Low X-ray surface brightness clusters: Implications on the scatter of the $M-T$ and $L-T$ relations

TL;DR

This study investigates the impact of low surface brightness galaxy clusters on the scatter of the $M-T$ and $L-T$ relations, revealing significant variability and implications for understanding cluster thermodynamics and survey biases.

Contribution

It introduces a sample of X-ray faint clusters, demonstrating their effect on the scatter of key scaling relations and providing a slope measurement for the $L_{500}-T$ relation free from common biases.

Findings

Large scatter (0.20 dex) in the $M-T$ relation for low surface brightness clusters.

Clusters follow a tight $L-T$ relation with a slope of 2.0.

X-ray luminosity and temperature are influenced by small-radius gas physics, unlike mass.

Abstract

We aim at studying scaling relations of a small but well defined sample of galaxy clusters that includes the recently discovered class of objects that are X-ray faint for their mass. These clusters have an average low X-ray surface brightness, a low gas fraction and are under-represented (by a factor of 10) in X-ray surveys or entirely absent in SZ surveys. With the inclusion of these objects, we find that the temperature-mass relation has an unprecedented large scatter, 0.20+-0.03 dex at fixed mass, as wide as allowed by the temperature range, and the location of a cluster in this plane depends on its surface brightness. Clusters obey a relatively tight luminosity-temperature relation independently of the their brightness. We interpret the wide difference in scatter around the two relations as due to the fact that X-ray luminosity and temperature are dominated by photons coming from small radii (in particular for T we used a 300 kpc aperture radius) and strongly affected by gas thermodynamics (e.g. shocks, cool-cores), whereas mass is dominated by dark matter at large radii. We measure a slope of 2.0+-0.2 for the L500-T relation. Given the characteristics of our sample, this value is free from the collinearity (degeneracy) between evolution and slope and from hypothesis on the undetected population, that both affect the analysis of X-ray selected samples, and can therefore be profitably used both as reference and to break the above degeneracy of X-ray selected-samples.