Cosmology and Astrophysics from Relaxed Galaxy Clusters V: Consistency with Cold Dark Matter Structure Formation

TL;DR

This study tests the predictions of Cold Dark Matter structure formation using X-ray data from 40 relaxed galaxy clusters, confirming the NFW profile and constraining the concentration-mass relation with results consistent with theoretical expectations.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed constraints on the concentration-mass relation and inner density profiles of relaxed galaxy clusters, testing key predictions of the CDM paradigm.

Findings

The concentration-mass relation follows a power-law with a slope of -0.16, consistent with CDM.

The inner density profile is well described by the NFW model, with detectable intrinsic scatter.

The shape parameters for GNFW and Einasto profiles are constrained, supporting the NFW form on average.

Abstract

This is the fifth in a series of papers studying the astrophysics and cosmology of massive, dynamically relaxed galaxy clusters. Our sample comprises 40 clusters identified as being dynamically relaxed and hot in Papers I and II of this series. Here we use constraints on cluster mass profiles from X-ray data to test some of the basic predictions of cosmological structure formation in the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm. We present constraints on the concentration--mass relation for massive clusters, finding a power-law mass dependence with a slope of $\kappa_m=-0.16\pm0.07$, in agreement with CDM predictions. For this relaxed sample, the relation is consistent with a constant as a function of redshift (power-law slope with $1+z$ of $\kappa_\zeta=-0.17\pm0.26$), with an intrinsic scatter of $\sigma_{\ln c}=0.16\pm0.03$. We investigate the shape of cluster mass profiles over the radial range probed by the data (typically $\sim50$kpc--1Mpc), and test for departures from the simple Navarro, Frenk & White (NFW) form, for which the logarithmic slope of the density profile tends to $-1$ at small radii. Specifically, we consider as alternatives the generalized NFW (GNFW) and Einasto parametrizations. For the GNFW model, we find an average value of (minus) the logarithmic inner slope of $\beta=1.02\pm0.08$, with an intrinsic scatter of $\sigma_\beta=0.22\pm0.07$, while in the Einasto case we constrain the average shape parameter to be $\alpha=0.29\pm0.04$ with an intrinsic scatter of $\sigma_\alpha=0.12\pm0.04$. Our results are thus consistent with the simple NFW model on average, but we clearly detect the presence of intrinsic, cluster-to-cluster scatter about the average.