The XMM--NEWTON Omega Project: II.Cosmological implications from the high redshift L-T relation of X-ray clusters

TL;DR

This study uses recent X-ray observations of distant galaxy clusters to test cosmological models, finding that high-density models match observed counts while low-density models overpredict high-redshift clusters, challenging the standard cosmological paradigm.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of the evolution of the temperature-luminosity relation of X-ray clusters and tests cosmological models against observed high-redshift cluster counts.

Findings

High-density models (Omega_M ≈ 1) match observed cluster counts.

Low-density models (Omega_M = 0.3) overpredict high-redshift clusters.

Results challenge the concordance cosmological model.

Abstract

The evolution with redshift of the temperature-luminosity relation of X-ray galaxy clusters is a key ingredient to break degeneracies in the interpretation of X-ray clusters redshift number counts. We therefore take advantage of the recent measurements of the temperature-luminosity relation of distant clusters observed with XMM-Newton and Chandra satellites to examine theoretical number counts expected for different available X-rays cluster samples, namely the RDCS, EMSS, SHARC, 160deg^2 and the MACS at redshift greater than 0.3. We derive these counts without any adjustment, using models previously normalized to the local temperature distribution function and to the high-z (z = 0.33) TDF. We find that these models having Omega_M in the range [0.85-1.] predict counts in remarkable agreement with the observed counts in the different samples. We illustrate that this conclusion is weakly sensitive to the various ingredients of the modeling. Therefore number counts provide a robust evidence of an evolving population. A realistic flat low density model (Omega_M = 0.3), normalized to the local abundance of clusters is found to overproduce cluster abundance at high redshift (above z = 0.5) by nearly an order of magnitude. This result is in conflict with the popular concordance model. The conflict could indicate a deviation from the expected scaling of the M-T relation with redshift.