Direct X-ray Spectral Deprojection of Galaxy Clusters

TL;DR

This paper validates a model-independent X-ray spectral deprojection method for galaxy clusters, improving the accuracy of temperature, density, and abundance profiles by addressing issues in traditional model-dependent techniques.

Contribution

It introduces and validates DSDeproj, a spherical symmetry-based, model-independent deprojection routine that overcomes limitations of existing methods.

Findings

DSDeproj produces smoother, more physical temperature profiles.

It effectively subtracts projected spectra to deproject data.

The method is validated against traditional approaches.

Abstract

Temperature, density and abundance profiles of the hot intracluster medium (ICM) are important diagnostics of the complex interactions of gravitational and feedback processes in the cores of galaxy clusters. Deprojection of X-ray data by methods such as projct, which are model dependent, can produce large and unphysical oscillating temperature profiles. Here we validate a deprojection routine, Direct Spectral Deprojection (DSDeproj; Sanders & Fabian 2007), showing that it solves some of the issues inherent to model-dependent deprojection routines. DSDeproj is a model-independent approach, assuming only spherical symmetry, which subtracts projected spectra from each successive annulus to produce a set of deprojected spectra.