Both, X-ray and radio observations, are beginning to probe regions in galaxy clusters close to the virial radius. These are particularly interesting regions as they are (i) crucial for the thermal evolution of the intra-cluster medium and (ii) they host plasmas under conditions that are poorly understood. Recently discovered giant radio relics in the galaxy cluster CIZA J2242.8+5301 provide unprecedented evidence for particle acceleration in cluster outskirts. We will discuss some of the intriguing puzzles that surround these relics. The polarisation of the radio emission yields information about the topology of magnetic fields in these shock waves. Here we report on MHD simulations that highlight some problems about the origin of these magnetic fields.
Galaxy cluster outskirts mark the transition region from the mildly non-linear cosmic web to the highly non-linear, virialised, cluster interior. It is in this transition region that the intra-cluster medium (ICM) begins to influence the properties of accreting galaxies and groups, as ram pressure impacts a galaxy's cold gas content and subsequent star formation rate. Conversely, the thermodynamical properties of the ICM in this transition region should also feel the influence of accreting substructure (i.e. galaxies and groups), whose passage can drive shocks. In this paper, we use a suite of…
Recent statistical X-ray measurements of the intracluster medium (ICM) indicate that gas temperature profiles in the outskirts of galaxy clusters deviate from self-similar evolution. Using a mass-limited sample of galaxy clusters from cosmological hydrodynamical simulations, we show that the departure from self-similarity can be explained by non-thermal gas motions driven by mergers and accretion. Contrary to previous claims, gaseous substructures only play a minor role in the temperature evolution in cluster outskirts. A careful choice of halo overdensity definition in self-similar scaling mi…
We present a joint Suzaku and XMM-Newton analysis of the outskirts of the nearby galaxy cluster Abell 2199, the only nearby galaxy cluster to be observed with near complete azimuthal coverage with Suzaku. Using the XMM-Newton observations to correct for the effects of gas clumping, we find that the azimuthally averaged entropy profile in the outskirts follows a power law with a slope of $1.20 \pm 0.23$, statistically consistent with a slope of 1.1 predicted by non-radiative simulations for purely gravitational hierarchical structure formation. However, when divided into 10 sectors, the entropy…
A self-similar spherical collapse model predicts a dark matter (DM) splashback and accretion shock in the outskirts of galaxy clusters while misses a key ingredient of structure formation - processes associated with mergers. To fill this gap, we perform simulations of merging self-similar clusters and investigate their DM and gas evolution in an idealized cosmological context. Our simulations show that the cluster rapidly contracts during the major merger and the splashback radius $r_{\rm sp}$ decreases, approaching the virial radius $r_{\rm vir}$. While $r_{\rm sp}$ correlates with a smooth m…
We present a new extended XMM-Newton mosaic of the nearby Coma cluster, which covers the cluster out to the virial radius with nearly complete azimuthal coverage. This large mosaic is combined with the Planck Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect observations to recover the thermodynamic properties of the intracluster medium in an azimuthally averaged profile and 36 angular sectors, producing the highest spatial resolution view of the thermodynamics of the outskirts of a galaxy cluster in its entirety. Beyond $r_{500}$, our clumping corrected entropy measurements along the less disturbed directions are st…
Clumping and turbulence are expected to affect the matter accreted onto the outskirts of galaxy clusters. To determine their impact on the thermodynamic properties of Abell 2142 we perform an analysis of the X-ray temperature data from XMM-Newton via our SuperModel, a state-of-the-art tool for investigating the astrophysics of the intracluster medium already tested on many individual clusters (since Cavaliere et al. 2009). Using the gas density profile corrected for clumpiness derived by Tchernin et al. (2016), we find evidence for the presence of a nonthermal pressure component required to su…
Based on the SDSS data, the properties of galaxies with quenched star formation (QGs) within the "splashback"-radius of galaxy clusters $R_{\rm sp}$ and beyond it have been studied. We used a sample of 40 groups and galaxy clusters and a sample of field galaxies at $0.02<z<0.045$. The radii $R_{\rm sp}$ were defined from the observed integrated distribution of the number of galaxies as a function of the squared distance from the center of the galaxy systems. We show that in galaxy clusters 72% of the QGs we have found are within $R_{\rm sp}$. About 40% of these galaxies are late-type ones with…
As the largest virialized structures in the universe, galaxy clusters continue to grow and accrete matter from the cosmic web. Due to the low gas density in the outskirts of clusters, measurements are very challenging, requiring extremely sensitive telescopes across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Observations using X-rays, the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, and weak lensing and galaxy distributions from the optical band, have over the last decade helped to unravel this exciting new frontier of cluster astrophysics, where the infall and virialization of matter takes place. Here, we review the …
One key ingredient in using galaxy clusters (GCs) as a precision cosmological probe in large X-ray surveys is to understand selection effects. The dependence of the X-ray emission on the square of the gas density leads to a predominant role of cool cores in the detection of GCs. The contribution of cool cores to the X-ray luminosity does not scale with GC mass and cosmology and therefore affects the use of X-ray GCs in producing cosmological constraints. One of the main science goals of the eROSITA mission is to constrain cosmology with a wide X-ray survey. We propose an eROSITA GC detection s…
The uniformity of the intra-cluster medium (ICM) enrichment level in the outskirts of nearby galaxy clusters suggests that chemical elements were deposited and widely spread into the intergalactic medium before the cluster formation. This observational evidence is supported by numerical findings from cosmological hydrodynamical simulations, as presented in Biffi et al. (2017), including the effect of thermal feedback from active galactic nuclei. Here, we further investigate this picture, by tracing back in time the spatial origin and metallicity evolution of the gas residing at z=0 in the outs…
Inferring line-of-sight distances from redshifts in and around galaxy clusters is complicated by peculiar velocities, a phenomenon known as the "Fingers of God" (FoG). This presents a significant challenge for finding filaments in large observational data sets as these artificial elongations can be wrongly identified as cosmic web filaments by extraction algorithms. Upcoming targeted wide-field spectroscopic surveys of galaxy clusters and their infall regions such as the WEAVE Wide-Field Cluster Survey motivate our investigation of the impact of FoG on finding filaments connected to clusters. …
The relaxed galaxy cluster Zwicky 3146 is analyzed via the SuperModel, a tool already tested on many clusters since 2009. In particular, this analysis is focused on the intracluster medium X-ray temperature data measured by XMM-Newton up to r_{500}. A previous analysis was based on the temperature profile derived from the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect pressure data. The gas mass fraction f_{gas} is obtained from the resulting SuperModel temperature profile extrapolated up to the virial radius R, that turns out in agreement with the steep temperature profiles observed by Suzaku, and from the gas den…
Observations of the ICM in the outskirts of the Virgo cluster with Suzaku have found the gas mass fraction in the northern direction to be significantly above the expected level, indicating that there may be a very high level of gas clumping on small scales in this direction. Here, we explore the XMM-Newton data in the outskirts of Virgo, dividing it into a Voronoi tessellation to separate the bulk ICM component from the clumped ICM component. As the nearest galaxy cluster, Virgo's large angular extent allows the spatial scale of the tessellation to be much smaller than has been achieved using…
We present a study of the distribution of X-ray detected active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the five most massive, $M_{500}^{SZ}>10^{14} M_{\odot}$ , and distant, z$\sim$1, galaxy clusters in the \textit{Planck} and South Pole Telescope (SPT)\textit{} surveys. The spatial and thermodynamic individual properties of each cluster have been defined with unprecedented accuracy at this redshift using deep X-ray observations. This is an essential property of our sample in order to precisely determine the $R_{500}^{Y_{\textrm x}}$ radius of the clusters. For our purposes, we computed the X-ray point-like…
Entropy is an advantageous diagnostics to study the thermodynamic history of the intracluster plasma of galaxy clusters. We present the entropy profile of the Abell 2244 galaxy cluster derived both exclusively using X-ray data from the low-background Swift XRT telescope and also using Planck y data. The entropy profile derivation using X-rays only is robust at least to the virial radius because the cluster brightness is large compared to the X-ray background at low energies, temperature is strongly bounded by the lack of cluster X-ray photons at energies kT>3 keV, and the XRT background is low…
We present the joint analysis of the X-ray and SZ signals in A2319, the galaxy cluster with the highest signal-to-noise ratio in Planck maps and that has been surveyed within our XMM Cluster Outskirts Project (X-COP). We recover the thermodynamical profiles by the geometrical deprojection of the X-ray surface brightness, of the SZ comptonization parameter, and an accurate and robust spectroscopic measurements of the temperature. We resolve the clumpiness of the density to be below 20 per cent demonstrating that most of this clumpiness originates from the ongoing merger and can be associated to…
We study the outskirts ($R<3R_{200c}$) of 40 groups and clusters of galaxies of the local Universe ($0.02<z<0.045$) with 300~km~s$^{-1}<σ<950$~km~s$^{-1}$. Using the SDSS DR10 catalog data, we measured the stellar mass of galaxy clusters in accordance with the previously determined $K_s$-luminosity (2MASX data) and found their correlation in the form $M_*/M_{\odot} \propto (L_K/L_{\odot})^{1.010\pm0.004}$ ($M_K<-21\,.\!\!^{\rm m}5$, $R<R_{200c}$). We also found the dependence of the galaxy cluster stellar mass on halo mass: $M_*/M_{\odot} \propto (M_{200c}/M_{\odot})^{0.77\pm0.01}$}. Our resul…
X-ray shocks and radio relics detected in the cluster outskirts are commonly interpreted as shocks induced by mergers of sub-clumps. We study the properties of merger shocks in merging galaxy clusters, using a set of cosmological simulations for the large-scale structure formation of the universe. As a representative case, we here focus on the simulated clusters that undergo almost head-on collisions with mass ratio $\sim2$. Due to the turbulent nature of the intracluster medium, shock surfaces are not smooth, but composed of shocks with different Mach numbers. As the merger shocks expand outw…
The Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect is the ideal probe for investigating the outskirts of galaxy clusters. To map this signal, we apply a spectral imaging technique which combines parametric component separation and sparse representations. Our procedure is an improved version of an existing algorithm, which now features a better treatment of astrophysical contaminants, and the implementation of a new beam deconvolution. We use the most recent frequency maps delivered by \textsl{Planck}, and we consider the clusters analysed in the \textsl{XMM} Cluster Outskirts Project (X-COP). In particular, we foc…
