A Chandra archival study of the temperature and metal abundance profiles in hot Galaxy Clusters at 0.1 < z < 0.3

TL;DR

This study analyzes temperature and metallicity profiles of 12 galaxy clusters at redshifts 0.1 to 0.3 using Chandra data, revealing consistent power-law behaviors outside the core and correlations with cooling times.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed comparison of temperature and metallicity profiles between intermediate-redshift clusters and local samples, highlighting differences between CC and NCC systems.

Findings

Power-law profiles describe temperature and metallicity beyond 0.1 r_180.

NCC profiles are steeper than CC profiles at larger radii.

Inner region deviations are significant only within 0.1 r_180.

Abstract

We present the analysis of the temperature and metallicity profiles of 12 galaxy clusters in the redshift range 0.1--0.3 selected from the Chandra archive with at least ~20,000 net ACIS counts and kT>6 keV. We divide the sample between 7 Cooling-Core (CC) and 5 Non-Cooling-Core (NCC) clusters according to their central cooling time. We find that single power-laws can describe properly both the temperature and metallicity profiles at radii larger than 0.1 r_180 in both CC and NCC systems, showing the NCC objects steeper profiles outwards. A significant deviation is only present in the inner 0.1 r_180. We perform a comparison of our sample with the De Grandi & Molendi BeppoSAX sample of local CC and NCC clusters, finding a complete agreement in the CC cluster profile and a marginally higher value (at ~1sigma) in the inner regions of the NCC clusters. The slope of the power-law describing kT(r) within 0.1 r_180 correlates strongly with the ratio between the cooling time and the age of the Universe at the cluster redshift, being the slope >0 and tau_c/tau_age<=0.6 in CC systems.