Discovering Shocks in the Intracluster Medium: Cosmological Simulations and Synthetic X-ray Observations of Clusters/Groups

Mathematics – Logic

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Scientific paper

The results of a study of X-ray substructure indicative of flow discontinuities in the intracluster gas are presented. We present high-resolution N-body/hydro cosmological simulations of a Λ CDM universe and synthetic X-ray observations of the resulting galaxy clusters/groups. The simulations show a complex web of shock structures in the intracluster medium of most clusters/groups, of which only a small fraction appear to be detected in X-ray observations of real clusters. These shocks result from supersonic flows generated during the process of accretion in large-scale structure, and serve as unique diagnostics of the dynamical state of the gas, and as tracers of the evolution of structure formation. A blind search for shocks in our synthetic X-ray images is performed to confirm the observational interpretation of X-ray features which presumably result from the presence of shocks and contact discontinuities. We show that the distribution of shocks in simulated cluster volumes can be reliably deduced using synthetic X-ray observations. A preliminary identification scheme for cold fronts in the synthetic observations shows that they have a similar distribution as a function of the steepness of the temperature jump as do shocks. We suggest observational strategies for identifying and classifying shocks and cold fronts. We find that the careful selection of X-ray energy bands for observation increases the probability of finding shocks. We also show that the X-ray emission character of gas in clusters/groups with Tx≤ 3 keV makes them excellent candidates for observational shock detection. This work is supported by the NSF and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute.

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