Issue |
A&A
Volume 533, September 2011
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A6 | |
Number of page(s) | 9 | |
Section | Cosmology (including clusters of galaxies) | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201016407 | |
Published online | 11 August 2011 |
The effect of helium sedimentation on galaxy cluster masses and scaling relations
1
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
e-mail: bonamem@email.uah.edu
2
Department of Physics, University of Alabama, Huntsville, AL 35899, USA
3
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL 35812, USA
4
Department of Astronomy, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
5
Department of Physics, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA
6
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
Received: 24 December 2010
Accepted: 21 June 2011
Context. Recent theoretical studies predict that the inner regions of galaxy clusters may have an enhanced helium abundance due to sedimentation over the cluster lifetime. If sedimentation is not suppressed (e.g., by tangled magnetic fields), this may significantly affect the cluster mass estimates.
Aims. We use Chandra X-ray observations of eight relaxed galaxy clusters to investigate the upper limits to the effect of helium sedimentation on the measurement of cluster masses and the best-fit slopes of the YX − M500 and YX − M2500 scaling relations.
Methods. We calculated gas mass and total mass in two limiting cases: a uniform, unenhanced abundance distribution and a radial distribution from numerical simulations of helium sedimentation on a timescale of 11 Gyr.
Results. The assumed helium sedimentation model, on average, produces a negligible increase in the gas mass inferred within large radii (r < r500) (1.3 ± 1.2%) and a 10.2 ± 5.5% mean decrease in the total mass inferred within r < r500. Significantly stronger effects in the gas mass (10.5 ± 0.8%) and total mass (25.1 ± 1.1%) are seen at small radii owing to a larger variance in helium abundance in the inner region, r ≤ 0.1 r500.
Conclusions. We find that the slope of the YX − M500 scaling relation is not significantly affected by helium sedimentation.
Key words: galaxies: clusters: general
© ESO, 2011
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.