Weighing Galaxy Clusters with Gas. II. On the Origin of Hydrostatic Mass Bias in LambdaCDM Galaxy Clusters

TL;DR

This paper investigates the origin of hydrostatic mass bias in galaxy clusters, revealing that gas acceleration significantly contributes to mass estimation errors, especially in unrelaxed and high-redshift clusters, affecting cosmological measurements.

Contribution

It identifies gas acceleration as a key, previously underappreciated source of bias in hydrostatic mass estimates using cosmological simulations.

Findings

Gas acceleration introduces a significant bias in unrelaxed clusters.

In relaxed clusters, acceleration bias is small but increases scatter.

High-redshift clusters exhibit larger acceleration biases in outskirts.

Abstract

The use of galaxy clusters as cosmological probes hinges on our ability to measure their masses accurately and with high precision. Hydrostatic mass is one of the most common methods for estimating the masses of individual galaxy clusters, which suffer from biases due to departures from hydrostatic equilibrium. Using a large, mass-limited sample of massive galaxy clusters from a high-resolution hydrodynamical cosmological simulation, in this work we show that in addition to turbulent and bulk gas velocities, acceleration of gas introduces biases in the hydrostatic mass estimate of galaxy clusters. In unrelaxed clusters, the acceleration bias is comparable to the bias due to non-thermal pressure associated with merger-induced turbulent and bulk gas motions. In relaxed clusters, the mean mass bias due to acceleration is small (<3%), but the scatter in the mass bias can be reduced by accounting for gas acceleration. Additionally, this acceleration bias is greater in the outskirts of higher redshift clusters where mergers are more frequent and clusters are accreting more rapidly. Since gas acceleration cannot be observed directly, it introduces an irreducible bias for hydrostatic mass estimates. This acceleration bias places limits on how well we can recover cluster masses from future X-ray and microwave observations. We discuss implications for cluster mass estimates based on X-ray, Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, and gravitational lensing observations and their impact on cluster cosmology.