Redshift evolution of the hot intracluster gas metallicity in the C-EAGLE cluster simulations

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution C-EAGLE simulations to analyze how the metallicity of hot intracluster gas evolves with redshift, especially in cluster outskirts, revealing early enrichment and complex core evolution driven by gas accretion.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the redshift evolution of cluster metallicity, highlighting the role of early enrichment and gas accretion in core metallicity changes, based on high-resolution simulations.

Findings

Metallicity in outskirts shows little evolution since z=2.

Fe abundance evolves at low redshift due to Type Ia supernovae.

Core metallicity evolution driven by accretion of low-metallicity gas.

Abstract

The abundance and distribution of metals in galaxy clusters contains valuable information about their chemical history and evolution. By looking at how metallicity evolves with redshift, it is possible to constrain the different metal production channels. We use the C-EAGLE clusters, a sample of 30 high resolution ($m_{gas} \simeq 1.8\times 10^{6}$ M$_{\odot}$) cluster zoom simulations, to investigate the redshift evolution of metallicity, with particular focus on the cluster outskirts. The early enrichment model, in which the majority of metals are produced in the core of cluster progenitors at high redshift, suggests that metals in cluster outskirts have not significantly evolved since $z=2$. With the C-EAGLE sample, we find reasonable agreement with the early enrichment model as there is very little scatter in the metallicity abundance at large radius across the whole sample, out to at least $z=2$. The exception is Fe for which the radial dependence of metallicity was found to evolve at low redshift as a result of being mainly produced by Type Ia supernovae, which are more likely to be formed at later times than core-collapse supernovae. We also found considerable redshift evolution of metal abundances in the cores of the C-EAGLE clusters which has not been seen in other simulations or observation based metallicity studies. Since we find this evolution to be driven by accretion of low metallicity gas, it suggests that the interaction between outflowing, AGN heated material and the surrounding gas is important for determining the core abundances in clusters.