A New Method to Quantify X-ray Substructures in Clusters of Galaxies

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for quantifying substructures in galaxy clusters using residual X-ray images, calibrates it on Chandra data, and explores its relation to cluster properties, revealing differences in scaling relations based on substructure levels.

Contribution

The paper presents a new residual image analysis technique to quantify galaxy cluster substructures and examines its implications for cosmological scaling relations.

Findings

Method accurately recovers substructure levels in high signal-to-noise clusters.

No correlation found between substructure level and cluster mass, temperature, or redshift.

Different scaling relations for high and low substructure clusters impact cosmological studies.

Abstract

We present a new method to quantify substructures in clusters of galaxies, based on the analysis of the intensity of structures. This analysis is done in a residual image that is the result of the subtraction of a surface brightness model, obtained by fitting a two-dimensional analytical model (beta-model or S\'ersic profile) with elliptical symmetry, from the X-ray image. Our method is applied to 34 clusters observed by the Chandra Space Telescope that are in the redshift range 0.02<z<0.2 and have a signal-to-noise ratio greater than 100. We present the calibration of the method and the relations between the substructure level with physical quantities, such as the mass, X-ray luminosity, temperature, and cluster redshift. We use our method to separate the clusters in two sub-samples of high and low substructure levels. We conclude, using Monte Carlo simulations, that the method recuperates very well the true amount of substructure for small angular core radii clusters (with respect to the whole image size) and good signal-to-noise observations. We find no evidence of correlation between the substructure level and physical properties of the clusters such as mass, gas temperature, X-ray luminosity and redshift. The scaling relations for the two sub-samples (high and low substructure level clusters) are different (they present an off-set, i.e., given a fixed mass or temperature, low substructure clusters tend to be more X-ray luminous), which is an important result for cosmological tests using the mass-luminosity relation to obtain the cluster mass function, since they rely on the assumption that clusters do not present different scaling relations according to their dynamical state.