Measuring turbulence and gas motions in galaxy clusters via synthetic Athena X-IFU observations

Understand

The X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) that will be on board the Athena telescope will provide an unprecedented view of the intracluster medium (ICM) kinematics through the observation of gas velocity, $v$, and velocity dispersion, $w$, via centroid-shift and broadening of emission lines, respectively.

• The improvement of data quality and quantity requires an assessment of the systematics associated with this new data analysis, namely biases, statistical and systematic errors, and possible correlations between the different measured quantities.
• We have developed an end-to-end X-IFU simulator that mimics a full X-ray spectral fitting analysis on a set of mock event lists, obtained using SIXTE.
• We have applied it to three hydrodynamical simulations of a Coma-like cluster that include the injection of turbulence.