The gravitational field of X-COP galaxy clusters

Abstract

The mass profiles of massive dark matter halos are highly sensitive to the nature of dark matter and potential modifications of the theory of gravity on large scales. The Λ cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm makes strong predictions on the shape of dark matter halos and on the dependence of the shape parameters on halo mass, such that any deviation from the predicted universal shape would have important implications for the fundamental properties of dark matter. Here we use a set of 12 galaxy clusters with available deep X-ray and Sunyaev–Zel’dovich data to constrain the shape of the gravitational field with an unprecedented level of precision over two decades in radius. We introduce a nonparametric framework to reconstruct the shape of the gravitational field under the assumption of hydrostatic equilibrium and compare the resulting mass profiles to the expectations of Navarro–Frenk–White (NFW) and Einasto parametric mass profiles. On average, we find that the NFW profile provides an excellent description of the recovered mass profiles, with deviations of less than 10% over a wide radial range. However, there appears to be more diversity in the shape of individual profiles than can be captured by the NFW model. The average NFW concentration and its scatter agree very well with the prediction of the ΛCDM framework. For a subset of systems, we disentangle the gravitational field into the contribution of baryonic components (gas, brightest cluster galaxy, and satellite galaxies) and that of dark matter. The stellar content dominates the gravitational field inside ∼0.02R500 but is responsible for only 1–2% of the total gravitational field inside R200. The total baryon fraction reaches the cosmic value at R200 and slightly exceeds it beyond this point, possibly indicating a mild level of nonthermal pressure support (10 − 20%) in cluster outskirts. Finally, the relation between observed and baryonic acceleration exhibits a complex shape that strongly departs from the radial acceleration relation in spiral galaxies, which shows that the aforementioned relation does not hold at the galaxy-cluster scale.