Mass Accretion and its Effects on the Self-Similarity of Gas Profiles in the Outskirts of Galaxy Clusters

Understand

Galaxy clusters exhibit remarkable self-similar behavior which allows us to establish simple scaling relationships between observable quantities and cluster masses, making galaxy clusters useful cosmological probes.

• Recent X-ray observations suggest that self-similarity may be broken in the outskirts of galaxy clusters.
• In this work, we analyze a mass-limited sample of massive galaxy clusters from the Omega500 cosmological hydrodynamic simulation to investigate the self-similarity of the diffuse X-ray emitting intracluster medium (ICM) in the outskirts of galaxy clusters.
• We find that the self-similarity of the outer ICM profiles is better preserved if they are normalized with respect to the mean density of the universe, while the inner profiles are more self-similar when normalized using the critical density.