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Title: The remarkable similarity of massive galaxy clusters from z~0 to z~1.9

Journal Article · · The Astrophysical Journal (Online)
ORCiD logo [1];  [2]; ORCiD logo [1];  [3];  [4]; ORCiD logo [5];  [1];  [4]; ORCiD logo [6]; ORCiD logo [7]; ORCiD logo [8]; ORCiD logo [9];  [10];  [2];  [6]
  1. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)
  2. Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA (United States); SLAC National Accelerator Lab., Menlo Park, CA (United States)
  3. Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States); Univ. of Chicago, Chicago, IL (United States)
  4. Univ. of Chicago, Chicago, IL (United States); Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
  5. Univ. of Missouri, Columbia, MO (United States)
  6. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA (United States)
  7. Univ. de Montreal, Montreal, QC (Canada)
  8. Huntingdon Institute for X-ray Astronomy, Huntingdon, PA (United States)
  9. Princeton Univ., Princeton, NJ (United States)
  10. Univ. of Chicago, Chicago, IL (United States)

We present the results of a Chandra X-ray survey of the 8 most massive galaxy clusters at z > 1.2 in the South Pole Telescope 2500 deg2 survey. We combine this sample with previously-published Chandra observations of 49 massive X-ray-selected clusters at 0 < z < 0.1 and 90 SZ-selected clusters at 0.25 < z < 1.2 to constrain the evolution of the intracluster medium (ICM) over the past ~10 Gyr. We find that the bulk of the ICM has evolved self similarly over the full redshift range probed here, with the ICM density at r > 0.2R500 scaling like E(z) 2 . In the centers of clusters (r . 0.01R500), we find significant deviations from self similarity (ne ∝ E(z) 0.1±0.5 ), consistent with no redshift dependence. When we isolate clusters with over-dense cores (i.e., cool cores), we find that the average over-density profile has not evolved with redshift – that is, cool cores have not changed in size, density, or total mass over the past ~9–10 Gyr. We show that the evolving “cuspiness” of clusters in the Xray, reported by several previous studies, can be understood in the context of a cool core with fixed properties embedded in a self similarly-evolving cluster. We find no measurable evolution in the X-ray morphology of massive clusters, seemingly in tension with the rapidly-rising (with redshift) rate of major mergers predicted by cosmological simulations. We show that these two results can be brought into agreement if we assume that the relaxation time after a merger is proportional to the crossing time, since the latter is proportional to H(z) -1.

Research Organization:
SLAC National Accelerator Lab., Menlo Park, CA (United States); Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States); Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP); National Science Foundation (NSF); National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES); Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
Contributing Organization:
SPT
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-76SF00515; AC02-07CH11359; AC02-06CH11357
OSTI ID:
1369250
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1352199; OSTI ID: 1373896
Report Number(s):
FERMILAB-PUB-17-072-AE; arXiv:1702.05094
Journal Information:
The Astrophysical Journal (Online), Vol. 843, Issue 1; ISSN 1538-4357
Publisher:
Institute of Physics (IOP)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 89 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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