Structural and dynamical modeling of WINGS clusters. III. The pseudo phase-space density profile

TL;DR

This study tests the power-law nature of pseudo phase-space density profiles in galaxy clusters using observational data, finding good agreement with simulations for some galaxy types and revealing differences based on galaxy morphology and cluster properties.

Contribution

It provides the first observational confirmation of power-law PPSD profiles in galaxy clusters and explores how these profiles vary with galaxy type and cluster characteristics.

Findings

PPSD profiles are generally power-law for most parameters.

Ellipticals and spirals show slopes consistent with simulations for certain PPSD definitions.

S0 galaxies and some cluster stacks exhibit shallower or non-power-law PPSD profiles.

Abstract

Numerical simulations indicate that cosmological halos display power-law radial profiles of pseudo phase-space density (PPSD), Q=rho/sigma^3, where rho is mass density and sigma velocity dispersion. We test these predictions using the parameters derived from the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis performed with the MAMPOSSt code on the observed kinematics of a velocity dispersion based stack (sigmav) of 54 nearby regular clusters of galaxies from the WINGS dataset. In the definition of PPSD, the density is either in total mass rho (Q_rho) or in galaxy number density nu (Q_nu) of three morphological classes of galaxies (ellipticals, lenticulars, and spirals), while the velocity dispersion (obtained by inversion of the Jeans equation) is either the total (Q_rho and Q_nu) or its radial component (Q_r,rho and Q_r,nu). We find that the PPSD profiles are power-law relations for nearly all MCMC parameters. The logarithmic slopes of our observed Q_rho(r) and Q_r,rho(r) for ellipticals and spirals are in excellent agreement with the predictions for particles in simulations, but slightly shallower for S0s. For Q_nu(r) and Q_r,nu(r), only the ellipticals have a PPSD slope matching that of particles in simulations, while the slope for spirals is much shallower, similar to that of subhalos. But for cluster stacks based on richness or gas temperature, the fraction of power-law PPSDs is lower (esp. Q_nu) and the Q_rho slopes are shallower, except for S0s. The observed PPSD profiles, defined using rho rather than nu, appear to be a fundamental property of galaxy clusters. They would be imprinted during an early phase of violent relaxation for dark matter and ellipticals, and later for spirals as they move towards dynamical equilibrium in the cluster gravitational potential, while S0s are either intermediate (richness and temperature-based stacks) or a mixed class (sigmav stack).