Modeling Increased Metal Production in Galaxy Clusters with Pair-Instability Supernovae

Abstract

Galaxy clusters contain much more metal per star, typically 3 times as much, than is produced in normal galaxies. We set out to determine what changes are needed to the stellar mass function and supernovae rates to account for this excess metal. In particular, we vary the Type Ia supernovae rate, IMF slope, upper and lower mass cutoffs, and the merger rate of massive stars. We then use existing simulation results for metal production from AGB stars, Type Ia SNe and core-collapse SNe to calculate the total amount of each element produced per solar mass of star formation. For models with very massive stars, we also include metal production from pair-instability supernovae (PISNe).We find that including PISNe makes it much easier to increase the amount of metal produced per stellar mass. Therefore a separate population of high-mass stars is not needed to produce the high amounts of metal found in galaxy clusters. We also find that including at least some PISNe increases the abundance of intermediate-mass elements relative to both oxygen and iron, consistent with observations of ICM abundances.

16 pages, 16 figures, submitted to MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Enrichment of the hot intracluster medium: observations
• Nebular spectra of pair-instability supernovae
• Chemical Evolution on the Scale of Clusters of Galaxies: A Conundrum?
• Origin of central abundances in the hot intra-cluster medium - II. Chemical enrichment and supernova yield models
• Iron in galaxy groups and clusters: Confronting galaxy evolution models with a newly homogenised dataset