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Cosmic accretion shocks as a tool to measure the dark matter mass of galaxy clusters

Nature Astronomy volume 8, pages 1195–1204 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Cosmological accretion shocks created during the formation of galaxy clusters are a ubiquitous phenomenon all around the universe. These shocks and their features are intimately related with the gravitational energy at stake during galaxy cluster formation. Studying a sample of simulated galaxy clusters and their associated accretion shocks, we show that objects in our sample sit in a plane within the three-dimensional space of cluster total mass, shock radius and Mach number (a measure of shock intensity). Using this relation, and considering that forthcoming new observations will be able to measure shock radii and intensities, we put forward the idea that the dark matter content of galaxy clusters could be indirectly measured with an error up to around 30% at the 1σ confidence level. This procedure would be a new and independent method to measure the dark matter mass in cosmic structures and a novel constraint to the accepted Lambda cold dark matter paradigm.

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Fig. 1: Best-fit relations for the mass, \({\mathbf{log }}_{\mathbf{10}}{\boldsymbol{M}}{\mathbf{(}}{\boldsymbol{<}}{\mathbf{2}}{\boldsymbol{R}}_{{{{\mathbf{vir}}}}}{\mathbf{)}}{\mathbf{=}}{\boldsymbol{f}}{\mathbf{(}}{\mathbf{log }}_{\mathbf{10}}{\boldsymbol{R}}_{{{{\mathbf{sh}}}}},{{{\boldsymbol{\mathcal{{M}}}}}}_{{{{\mathbf{sh}}}}}{\mathbf{)}}\).
Fig. 2: Scaling relation evolution summary.
Fig. 3: Distribution of the masses recovered by our best-fit relation to assess its intrinsic scatter.

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Data availability

The data presented in the figures has been provided as Supplementary Information. Further data underlying this article will be shared upon reasonable request to the corresponding author.

Code availability

The halo finder ASOHF is publicly available via GitHub at https://github.com/dvallesp/ASOHF. The shock finder, the simulation code (MASCLET) and the codes for analysing the output data and producing the figures will be shared upon reasonable request to the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

D.V.-P., V.Q. and S.P. have been supported by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación Española (grant no. PID2022-138855NB-C33), the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación within the Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia del Gobierno de España through the project ASFAE/2022/001, with funding from European Union NextGenerationEU (grant no. PRTR-C17.I1), and by the Generalitat Valenciana (grant no. CIPROM/2022/49). D.V.-P. acknowledges additional support from Universitat de València through an Atracció de Talent fellowship. Simulations have been carried out using the supercomputer Lluís Vives at the Servei d’Informàtica of the Universitat de València.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departament d’Astronomia i Astrofísica, Universitat de València, Burjassot, Spain

    David Vallés-Pérez, Vicent Quilis & Susana Planelles

  2. Observatori Astronòmic, Universitat de València, Paterna, Spain

    Vicent Quilis & Susana Planelles

Authors
  1. David Vallés-Pérez
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  2. Vicent Quilis
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Contributions

V.Q. initiated the project. V.Q. and D.V.-P. ran the cosmological simulation. S.P. and D.V.-P. developed the shock and halo finders. D.V.-P. performed the data analysis and produced the figures. D.V.-P., S.P. and V.Q. discussed the results and wrote this paper.

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Correspondence to David Vallés-Pérez.

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Supplementary Information

The file contains all the supplementary material for the paper. This includes ten supplementary discussion sections (A–J), Figs. 1–11 and Table 1.

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Source Data Fig. 1

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Data points and error bars for the upper-left, upper-right, lower-left and lower-right panels in Fig. 2.

Source Data Fig. 3

Values for the colormap representation and for the lines shown in the left-hand and right-hand panels of Fig. 3.

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Vallés-Pérez, D., Quilis, V. & Planelles, S. Cosmic accretion shocks as a tool to measure the dark matter mass of galaxy clusters. Nat Astron 8, 1195–1204 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02303-x

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