Gas clumping in the outskirts of the Virgo cluster

Abstract

ABSTRACT Observations of the intracluster medium (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 the same technique on intermediate-redshift clusters, allowing us to probe gas clumping on the scales down to 5 × 5 kpc2. We find that the level of gas clumping in the outskirts to the north is relatively mild, ($\sqrt{C} \lt 1.1$), suggesting that our point-source detection procedure may have excluded a significant fraction of clumps. While correcting for clumping brings the gas mass fraction at r200 into agreement with the universal gas mass fraction, the values outside r200 remain significantly above it. This may suggest that non-thermal pressure support in the outskirts to the north is significant, and we find that a non-thermal pressure support at the level of 20 per cent of the total pressure outside r200 can explain the high gas mass fraction to the north, which is in agreement with the range expected from simulations.