A Catalog of Galaxy Clusters Observed by XMM-Newton

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive catalog of galaxy clusters observed by XMM-Newton, detailing temperature, abundance, and brightness profiles, along with novel background modeling techniques to improve analysis accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a new 'first principles' background modeling approach and applies it to create a uniform, detailed catalog of galaxy cluster observations from XMM-Newton.

Findings

Significant differences between Chandra and XMM-Newton temperature measurements.

Development of a detailed background removal method for low surface brightness objects.

A publicly available catalog of 70 galaxy clusters with temperature, abundance, and brightness profiles.

Abstract

Aims: We present a uniform catalog of the images and radial profiles of the temperature, abundance, and brightness for 70 clusters of galaxies observed by XMM-Newton. Methods: We use a new "first principles" approach to the modeling and removal of the background components; the quiescent particle background, the cosmic diffuse emission, the soft proton contamination, and the solar wind charge exchange emission. Each of the background components demonstrate significant spectral variability, several have spatial distributions that are not described by the photon vignetting function, and all except for the cosmic diffuse emission are temporally variable. Because these backgrounds strongly affect the analysis of low surface brightness objects, we provide a detailed description our methods of identification, characterization, and removal. Results: We have applied these methods to a large collection of XMM-Newton observations of clusters of galaxies and present the resulting catalog. We find significant systematic differences between the Chandra and XMM-Newton temperatures.