Gas clumping and its effect on hydrostatic bias in the MACSIS simulations

TL;DR

This study uses hydrodynamical simulations to analyze gas clumping in galaxy clusters, its impact on hydrostatic mass bias, and methods to mitigate this bias for more accurate mass estimates, relevant for upcoming X-ray missions.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the relationship between gas clumping, observational proxies, and hydrostatic bias, and evaluates correction methods using simulations.

Findings

Gas clumping and azimuthal scatter increase with radius and mass.

Weak correlation between clumping proxies and hydrostatic bias.

Non-thermal pressure correction improves mass estimates from projected profiles.

Abstract

We use the MACSIS hydrodynamical simulations to estimate the extent of gas clumping in the intracluster medium of massive galaxy clusters and how it affects the hydrostatic mass bias. By comparing the clumping to the azimuthal scatter in the emission measure, an observational proxy, we find that they both increase with radius and are larger in higher-mass and dynamically perturbed systems. Similar trends are also seen for the azimuthal temperature scatter and non-thermal pressure fraction, both of which correlate with density fluctuations, with these values also increasing with redshift. However, in agreement with recent work, we find only a weak correlation between the clumping, or its proxies, and the hydrostatic mass bias. To reduce the effect of clumping in the projected profiles, we compute the azimuthal median following recent observational studies, and find this reduces the scatter in the bias. We also attempt to correct the cluster masses by using a non-thermal pressure term and find over-corrected mass estimates ($1-b=0.86$ to $1-b=1.15$) from 3D gas profiles but improved mass estimates ($1-b=0.75$ to $1-b=0.85$) from projected gas profiles, with the caveat of systematically increased scatter. We conclude that the cluster-averaged mass bias is minimised from applying a non-thermal pressure correction ($1-b=0.85$) with more modest reductions from selecting clusters that have low clumping ($1-b=0.79$) or are dynamically relaxed ($1-b=0.80$). However, the latter selection is most effective at minimising the scatter for individual objects. Such results can be tested with next generation X-ray missions equipped with high-resolution spectrometers such as Athena.