Related papers: Determining Distances to Clusters of Galaxies usin…
Clusters of galaxies are used in a variety of ways to do cosmology. Some of them are presented here. Their X-ray emitting gas allows us to determine the baryon fraction, dark matter distribution and the matter density $\Omega_{m}$ of the…
Emission lines in X-ray spectra of clusters of galaxies reveal the presence of heavy elements in the diffuse hot plasma (the Intra Cluster Medium, or ICM) in virial equilibrium in the dark matter potential well. The relatively simple…
We propose an ambitious new method that models the intracluster medium in clusters of galaxies as a set of X-ray emitting smoothed particles of plasma. Each smoothed particle is described by a handful of parameters including temperature,…
The selection of clusters of galaxies through their X-ray emission has proved to be an extremely powerful technique over the past four decades. The growth of X-ray astronomy has provided the community with a steadily more detailed view of…
As is known, resonant scattering can distort the surface-brightness profiles of clusters of galaxies in X-ray lines. We demonstrate that the scattered line emission should be polarized and possibly detectable with near-future X-ray…
Clusters of galaxies can be used for very different kinds of cosmological tests. I review a few of the methods: determination of cluster masses and dark matter content, metal enrichment and its connection to the origin of the intra-cluster…
The cooling cores of clusters of galaxies are among the brightest thermal X-ray line sources in the universe. High resolution X-ray spectra would allow individual line fluxes to be measured. The fluxes of low ionization X-ray lines in…
In addition to cosmological tests based on the mass function and clustering of galaxy clusters, which probe the growth of cosmic structure, nature offers two independent ways of using clusters to measure cosmic distances. The first uses…
Long arcs in clusters of galaxies, produced by gravitational lensing, can be used to estimate the mass interior to the arcs and therefore, constrain the cluster mass distribution. The radial density distribution of the intracluster gas…
ROSAT observations indicate that approximately half of all nearby groups of galaxies contain spatially extended X-ray emission. The radial extent of the X-ray emission is typically 50-500 kpc or approximately 10-50% of the virial radius of…
Clusters of galaxies are the largest gravitationally bound systems and therefore provide an important way of studying the formation and evolution of the large scale structure of the Universe. Cluster evolution can be inferred from…
The detection of clusters of galaxies in large surveys plays an important part in extragalactic astronomy, and particularly in cosmology, since cluster counts can give strong constraints on cosmological parameters. X-ray imaging is in…
While very often a hot intergalactic medium (IGM) is optically thin to continuum radiation, the optical depth in resonant lines can be of order unity or larger. Resonant scattering in the brightest X-ray emission lines can cause distortions…
X-ray and Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect observations can be combined to measure the distance to clusters of galaxies. If the intracluster gas distribution is not spherical, but elongated by a factor of Z along the line of sight, the inferred…
Clusters of galaxies outline the network of the distribution of visible matter in the Universe, marking the highest-mass knots where filamentary structures join together. If we observe the sky in X rays, clusters of galaxies stand out as…
Clusters of galaxies contain a hot gas, which emits in X-rays. X-ray telescopes such as XMM-Newton allow to study this plasma to obtain information on physical quantities of these objects. We present here some results on the total mass…
The study of galaxy cluster outskirts has emerged as one of the new frontiers in extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology with the advent of new observations in X-ray and microwave. However, the thermodynamic properties and chemical…
This lecture is an introduction to cosmological tests with clusters of galaxies. Here I do not intend to provide a complete review of the subject, but rather to describe the basic procedures to set up the fitting machinery to constrain…
We investigate the evolution of clusters of galaxies in a sample of distant clusters with redshifts between 0.3 and 1.0. We show the abilities and limitations of combined ROSAT and ASCA data to draw cosmological conclusions. For the first…
High-spectral resolution observations of clusters of galaxies are a powerful tool to understand the physical processes taking place in these massive objects. Their hot multi-million-degree X-ray emitting cluster atmospheres, containing most…