The clus model in SPEX: projection and resonant scattering effects on the iron abundance and temperature profiles of galaxy clusters

TL;DR

This paper introduces the clus model in SPEX for simulating galaxy cluster spectra, accounting for projection and resonant scattering effects, and demonstrates its impact on inferred temperature and iron abundance profiles.

Contribution

The paper presents the newly implemented clus model in SPEX that incorporates 3D profiles and resonant scattering effects for more accurate galaxy cluster spectral analysis.

Findings

Projection and resonant scattering significantly affect iron abundance profiles.

Different models cannot accurately describe the emission measure distribution.

Projection effects influence temperature measurements depending on the object and region.

Abstract

In this paper we introduce the clus model, which has been newly implemented in the X-ray spectral fitting software package SPEX. Based on the 3D radial profiles of the gas density, temperature, metal abundance, turbulent, and inflow/outflow velocities, the clus model creates spectra for a chosen projected region on the sky. Additionally, it can also take into account the resonant scattering. We show a few applications of the clus model on simulated spectra of the massive elliptical galaxy NGC 4636, and galaxy clusters A383, A2029, A1795, A262, and the Perseus cluster. We quantify the effect of projection, as well as resonant scattering on inferred profiles of the iron abundance and temperature, assuming the resolution similar to Chandra ACIS-S and XRISM Resolve. Our results show that, depending on the mass of the object, as well as the projected distance from its core, neither a single-temperature, double-temperature, nor the Gaussian-shaped differential emission measure models can accurately describe the input emission measure distribution of these massive objects. The largest effect of projection as well as resonant scattering is seen for projected profiles of iron abundance of NGC 4636, where we are able to reproduce the observed iron abundance drop in its inner-most few kiloparsecs. Furthermore, we find that projection effects also influence the best-fit temperature, and the magnitude of this effect varies depending on the underlying hydrodynamical profiles of individual objects. In the core, the projection effects are the largest for A1795 and NGC 4636, while in the outskirts the largest difference between 2D and 3D temperature profiles are for Perseus and A1795, regardless of the instrumental resolution. These findings might potentially have an impact on cross-calibration studies between different instruments, as well as on the precision cosmology.