Discovery of a cool, metal-rich gas reservoir in the outskirts of z ~ 0.5 clusters

TL;DR

This study reveals a significant presence of cool, metal-rich gas in the outskirts of galaxy clusters at z ~ 0.5, detected via MgII absorption in quasar spectra, indicating gas stripping processes extend beyond the cluster core.

Contribution

First statistically significant detection of cool, metal-rich gas in cluster outskirts at z ~ 0.5 using a large quasar-cluster pair sample.

Findings

MgII absorption detected in stacked spectra of background quasars.

Absorption strength declines with impact parameter and cluster-centric distance.

Gas stripping may influence cluster outskirts beyond 3 times R500.

Abstract

We built the first-ever statistically significant sample of ~ 80,000 background quasar - foreground cluster pairs to study the cool, metal-rich gas in the outskirts (> R500) of z ~ 0.5 clusters with a median mass of ~ 10^14.2 M_sun. The sample was obtained by cross-matching the SDSS cluster catalog of Wen & Han (2015) and SDSS quasar catalog of Lyke et al. (2020). The median impact parameter (rho_cl) of the clusters from the quasar sightlines is 2.4 Mpc (median rho_cl/R500 = 3.6). A strong MgII, along with marginal FeII, absorption is detected in the mean and median stacked spectra of the quasars with total MgII rest-frame equivalent width (W^(2796+2803)) of 0.034 pm 0.005 A (7simga) and 0.010 pm 0.003 A (3sigma), respectively. The W^(2796+2803) shows a declining trend with increasing rho_cl and rho_cl/R500, but does not show any significant trend with mass (M500) or redshift (zcl) within the small M500 and zcl ranges probed here. The MgII absorption signal and the trends persist even if we exclude the quasar-cluster pairs where the background quasars may be probing the circum-galactic medium (CGM) of bright galaxies with impact parameters < 300 kpc. The MgII (and FeII) absorption reported here is the first detection of its kind. It indicates the presence of a cool, metal-rich gas reservoir surrounding galaxy clusters out to several R500. We suggest that the metal-rich gas in the cluster outskirts arise from stripped materials and that gas stripping may be important out to large clustocentric distances (> 3R500 ).