Simulating the impact of dust cooling on the statistical properties of the intracluster medium

TL;DR

This paper uses hydrodynamic simulations to investigate how dust cooling influences the statistical properties and scaling relations of galaxy clusters, revealing subtle but significant effects on their thermodynamics.

Contribution

It introduces the implementation of dust cooling in large-scale structure simulations and analyzes its impact on cluster scaling relations, a novel aspect in cluster formation studies.

Findings

Dust cooling alters the normalization of the $L_X-T_X$ relation by up to 10%.

The $T_X-M$ relation normalization changes by only about 2%.

Dust acts as a non-gravitational process shaping the intracluster medium thermodynamics.

Abstract

From the first stages of star and galaxy formation, non-gravitational processes such as ram pressure stripping, SNs, galactic winds, AGNs, galaxy-galaxy mergers, etc... lead to the enrichment of the IGM in stars, metals as well as dust, via the ejection of galactic material into the IGM. We know now that these processes shape, side by side with gravitation, the formation and the evolution of structures. We present here hydrodynamic simulations of structure formation implementing the effect of the cooling by dust on large scale structure formation. We focus on the scale of galaxy clusters and study the statistical properties of clusters. Here we present our results on the $T_X-M$ and the $L_X-M$ scaling relations which exhibit changes on both the slope and normalization when adding cooling by dust to the standard radiative cooling model. For example, the normalization of the $T_X-M$ relation changes only by a maximum of 2% at $M=10^{14}$ M$_\odot$ whereas the normalization of the $L_X-T_X$ changes by as much as 10% at $T_X=1$ keV for models that including dust cooling. Our study shows that the dust is an added non-gravitational process that contributes shaping the thermodynamical state of the hot ICM gas.