Kay, S T, da Silva, A C, Aghanim, N, Blanchard, A, Liddle, Andrew, Puget, JL, Sadat, R and Thomas, Peter (2007) The evolution of clusters in the CLEF cosmological simulation: X-ray structural and scaling properties. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 377 (1). pp. 317-334. ISSN 0035-8711

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Abstract

We present results from a study of the X-ray cluster population that forms within the CLEF cosmological hydrodynamics simulation, a large N-body/SPH simulation of the Lambda cold dark matter cosmology with radiative cooling, star formation and feedback. With nearly 100 (kT > 2 keV) clusters at z= 0 and 60 at z= 1, our sample is one of the largest ever drawn from a single simulation and allows us to study variations within the X-ray cluster population both at low and high redshift. The scaled projected temperature and entropy profiles at z= 0 are in good agreement with recent high-quality observations of cool core clusters, suggesting that the simulation grossly follows the processes that structure the intracluster medium (ICM) in these objects. Cool cores are a ubiquitous phenomenon in the simulation at low and high redshift, regardless of a cluster's dynamical state. This is at odds with the observations and so suggests there is still a heating mechanism missing from the simulation. The fraction of irregular (major merger) systems, based on an observable measure of substructure within X-ray surface brightness maps, increases with redshift, but always constitutes a minority population within the simulation. Using a simple, observable measure of the concentration of the ICM, which correlates with the apparent mass deposition rate in the cluster core, we find a large dispersion within regular clusters at low redshift, but this diminishes at higher redshift, where strong cooling-flow systems are absent in our simulation. Consequently, our results predict that the normalization and scatter of the luminosity–temperature relation should decrease with redshift; if such behaviour turns out to be a correct representation of X-ray cluster evolution, it will have significant consequences for the number of clusters found at high redshift in X-ray flux-limited surveys.

Item Type:	Article
Schools and Departments:	School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences > Physics and Astronomy
Depositing User:	Andrew Liddle
Date Deposited:	06 Feb 2012 18:18
Last Modified:	07 Aug 2019 08:57
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/15729

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