Mass-Metallicity Relation from Cosmological Hydrodynamical Simulations and X-ray Observations of Galaxy Groups and Clusters

Truong, Nhut and Rasia, Elena and Biffi, Veronica and Mernier, Francois and Werner, Norbert (2019) Mass-Metallicity Relation from Cosmological Hydrodynamical Simulations and X-ray Observations of Galaxy Groups and Clusters. MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY, 484 (2). pp. 2896-2913. ISSN 0035-8711

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Abstract

Recent X-ray observations of galaxy clusters show that the distribution of intra-cluster medium (ICM) metallicity is remarkably uniform in space and in time. In this paper, we analyse a large sample of simulated objects, from poor groups to rich clusters, to study the dependence of the metallicity and related quantities on the scale of systems. The simulations are performed with an improved version of the Smoothed-Particle-Hydrodynamics \texttt{GADGET-3} code and consider various astrophysical processes including radiative cooling, metal enrichment and feedback from stars and active galactic nuclei (AGN). The scaling between the metallicity and the temperature and its evolution obtained in the simulations agrees well with the observational results obtained from two data samples characterised by a wide range of masses and a large redshift coverage. We find that at present time ($z=0$) the iron abundance in the cluster core ($r<0.1R_{500}$) does not correlate with the temperature and does not present a significant evolution. The scale invariance is confirmed when the metallicity is related directly with the total mass. The slope of the best-fitting relations is shallow ($\beta\sim-0.1$) in the innermost regions ($r<0.5R_{500}$) and consistent with zero outside. We investigate the impact of the AGN feedback and find that it plays a key role in producing a constant value of the outskirts metallicity from groups to clusters. This finding additionally supports the picture of early enrichment.

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