Spatial distribution of dark matter in and around galaxy clusters traced by galaxies, gas and intracluster stars in a simulated universe

TL;DR

This study uses the IllustrisTNG simulation to analyze how well galaxies, gas, and intracluster stars trace the dark matter distribution in galaxy clusters, finding galaxies are reliable tracers even in complex environments.

Contribution

It demonstrates that galaxy distributions, especially mass-weighted number density maps, effectively trace dark matter in and around galaxy clusters, with better correlation in virialized clusters.

Findings

Galaxy ellipticity correlates best with galaxy mass-weighted number density.

Galaxy maps best reproduce dark matter ellipticity across radii.

Virialized clusters show stronger correlation between components.

Abstract

To understand how well galaxies, gas and intracluster stars trace dark matter in and around galaxy clusters, we use the IllustrisTNG cosmological hydrodynamical simulation and compare the spatial distribution of dark matter with those of baryonic components in clusters. To quantify the global morphology of the density distribution of each component in clusters, we fit an ellipse to the density contour of each component and derive shape parameters at different radii. We find that ellipticity of dark matter is better correlated with that of galaxy mass-weighted number density, rather than with that of galaxy number density or galaxy velocity dispersion. We thus use the galaxy mass-weighted number density map as a representative of the galaxy maps. Among three different density maps from galaxies, gas, and intracluster stars, the ellipticity of dark matter is best reproduced by that of the galaxy map over the entire radii. The 'virialized' galaxy clusters show a better correlation of spatial distribution between dark matter and other components than the 'unvirialized' clusters, suggesting that it requires some time for each component to follow the spatial distribution of dark matter after merging events. Our results demonstrate that galaxies are still good tracers of dark matter distribution even in the non-linear regime corresponding to the scales in and around galaxy clusters, being consistent with the case where galaxies trace well the matter distribution in cosmologically large scales.