Cosmological Implications and Physical Properties of an X-Ray Flux-Limited Sample of Galaxy Clusters

Various cosmological applications of galaxy clusters are presented. Clusters are used to determine the baryon fraction, dark matter distribution and the matter density of the universe. They also contain a wealth of information about structure formation and evolution on different scales: large-scale structure, cluster formation and also galaxy formation via the interaction of cluster galaxies with the intra-cluster medium. In particular, the X-ray satellites CHANDRA and XMM yi...

The 3rd year WMAP results mark a shift in best fit values of cosmological parameters compared to the 1st year data and the concordance cosmological model. We test the consistency of the new results with previous constraints on cosmological parameters from the HIFLUGCS galaxy cluster sample and the impact of this shift on the X-ray luminosity-gravitational mass relation. The measured X-ray luminosity function combined with the observed luminosity-mass relation are compared to ...

(Abriged) We present the analysis of the baryonic content of 52 X-ray luminous galaxy clusters observed with Chandra in the redshift range 0.3-1.273. We use the deprojected X-ray surface brightness profiles and the measured values of the gas temperature to recover the gas and total mass profiles. By assuming that galaxy clusters are representative of the cosmic baryon budget, the distribution of the cluster baryon fraction in the hottest (T> 4 keV) systems as a function of re...

There has been extensive recent progress in X-ray observations of clusters of galaxies with the analysis of the entire ASCA database and recent new results from Beppo-SAX, Chandra, and XMM-Newton. The temperature profiles of most clusters are isothermal from 0.05--0.6 virial radii, contrary to theoretical expectations and early results from ASCA. Similarly, the abundance profiles of Fe are roughly constant outside the central regions. The luminosity-temperature relation for a...

Clusters of galaxies outline the network of the distribution of visible matter in the Universe, marking the highest-mass knots where filamentary structures join together. If we observe the sky in X rays, clusters of galaxies stand out as cosmic lighthouses by virtue of a thin gas trapped and heated within their gravitational potential wells. This powerful emission is directly linked to the total gravitating mass they contain, such that they can be efficiently used as tracers ...

We review recent progress in the description of the formation and evolution of galaxy clusters in a cosmological context by using numerical simulations. We focus our presentation on the comparison between simulated and observed X-ray properties, while we will also discuss numerical predictions on properties of the galaxy population in clusters. Many of the salient observed properties of clusters, such as X-ray scaling relations, radial profiles of entropy and density of the i...

We re-examine the X-ray luminosity-temperature relation using a nearly homogeneous data set of 24 clusters selected for statistically accurate temperature measurements and absence of strong cooling flows. The data exhibit a remarkably tight power-law relation between bolometric luminosity and temperature with a slope 2.88 \pm 0.15. With reasonable assumptions regarding cluster structure, we infer an upper limit on fractional variations in the intracluster gas fraction <(\delt...

As the largest gravitationally bound structures known, clusters provide clear constraints on the formation of structure and on the composition of the universe. Despite their extreme importance for cosmology the number of clusters at high redshift (z > 0.75) is rather small. There are only a few X-ray emitting examples reported and a handful of optically-selected ones. These clusters can provide stringent constrains on theories of large scale structure formation, if they are m...

X-ray observations of clusters provide key information on the dark matter, on the formation of structures in the Universe, and can be used to constrain the cosmological parameters. I review our current knowledge, with emphasis on recent XMM and Chandra results.

We selected an unbiased, flux-limited and almost volume-complete sample of 13 distant, X-ray luminous (DXL, $z\sim 0.3$) clusters and one supplementary cluster at $z=0.2578$ from the REFLEX Survey (the REFLEX-DXL sample). We performed a detailed study to explore their X-ray properties using XMM-Newton observations. Based on the precise radial distributions of the gas density and temperature, we obtained robust cluster masses and gas mass fractions. The average gas mass fracti...