Three-dimensional reconstruction of the intra-cluster medium

Free access article

Issue		A&A Volume 455, Number 3, September I 2006


Page(s)		791 - 801
Section		Cosmology (including clusters of galaxies)
DOI		http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361:20054717

A&A 455, 791-801 (2006)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20054717

Three-dimensional reconstruction of the intra-cluster medium

E. Puchwein and M. Bartelmann

Zentrum für Astronomie der Universität Heidelberg, ITA, Albert-Überle-Str. 2, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany
e-mail: puchwein@ita.uni-heidelberg.de

(Received 19 December 2005 / Accepted 17 May 2006)

Abstract
We propose and test a new method based on Richardson-Lucy deconvolution to reconstruct three-dimensional gas density and temperature distributions in galaxy clusters from combined X-ray and thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich observations. Clusters are assumed to be axially symmetric and arbitrarily inclined with respect to the line-of-sight. No equilibrium assumption other than local thermal equilibrium is needed. We test the algorithm with synthetic observations of analytically modeled and numerically simulated galaxy clusters and discuss the quality of the density and temperature reconstructions in idealised situations and in presence of observational noise, deviations from axial symmetry and cluster substructure. We find that analytic and numerical gas density and temperature distributions can be accurately reconstructed in three dimensions, even if observational noise is present. We also discuss methods for determining the inclination angle from data and show that it can be constrained using X-ray temperature maps. For a realistic cluster and including observational noise the three-dimensional reconstructions reach a level of accuracy of about 15%.

Key words: galaxies: clusters: general -- X-rays: galaxies: clusters -- submillimeter

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