Galaxy cluster photons alter the ionisation state of the nearby warm-hot intergalactic medium

TL;DR

This study investigates how photons emitted by galaxy clusters influence the ionisation state of surrounding diffuse gas, revealing significant effects on ionisation fractions and column densities near massive clusters.

Contribution

It introduces a model incorporating cluster photon emission into ionisation calculations, highlighting its impact on the ionisation balance of the intergalactic medium.

Findings

Cluster photons significantly alter ionisation fractions of key ions.

Ionisation parameters near clusters cannot be described by simple models.

Line-of-sight column densities are affected, with suppression or enhancement of certain ions.

Abstract

The physical properties of the faint and extremely tenuous plasma in the far outskirts of galaxy clusters, the circumgalactic media of normal galaxies, and filaments of the cosmic web, remain one of the biggest unknowns in our story of large-scale structure evolution. Modelling the spectral features due to emission and absorption from this very diffuse plasma poses a challenge, as both collisional and photo-ionisation processes must be accounted for. In this paper, we study the ionisation by photons emitted by the intra-cluster medium in addition to the photo-ionisation by the cosmic UV/X-ray background on gas in the vicinity of galaxy clusters. For near massive clusters such as A2029, the ionisation parameter can no longer describe the ionisation balance uniquely. The ionisation fractions (in particular of C IV, C V, C VI, N VII, O VI, O VII, O VIII, Ne VIII, Ne IX, and Fe XVII) obtained by taking into account the photoionisation by the cosmic background are either an upper or lower limit to the ionisation fraction calculated as a function of distance from the emission from the cluster. Using a toy model of a cosmic web filament, we predict how the cluster illumination changes the column densities for two different orientations of the line of sight. For lines of sight passing close to the cluster outskirts, O VI can be suppressed by a factor of up to $4.5$, O VII by a factor of $2.2$, C V by a factor of $3$, and Ne VIII can be boosted by a factor of $2$, for low density gas.