Redshift evolution of the hot intracluster gas metallicity in the C-EAGLE cluster simulations

Abstract

The abundance and distribution of metals in galaxy clusters contains valuable information about their chemical history and evolution. By looking at how metallicity evolves with redshift, it is possible to constrain the different metal production channels. We use the C-EAGLE clusters, a sample of 30 high resolution ($m_{gas}\simeq 1.8\times 10^6$ M${}_{\odot }$) cluster zoom simulations, to investigate the redshift evolution of metallicity, with particular focus on the cluster outskirts. The early enrichment model, in which the majority of metals are produced in the core of cluster progenitors at high redshift, suggests that metals in cluster outskirts have not significantly evolved since $z=2$. With the C-EAGLE sample, we find reasonable agreement with the early enrichment model as there is very little scatter in the metallicity abundance at large radius across the whole sample, out to at least $z=2$. The exception is Fe for which the radial dependence of metallicity was found to evolve at low redshift as a result of being mainly produced by Type Ia supernovae, which are more likely to be formed at later times than core-collapse supernovae. We also found considerable redshift evolution of metal abundances in the cores of the C-EAGLE clusters which has not been seen in other simulations or observation based metallicity studies. Since we find this evolution to be driven by accretion of low metallicity gas, it suggests that the interaction between outflowing, AGN heated material and the surrounding gas is important for determining the core abundances in clusters.

18 pages, 16 figures, submitted to MNRAS

References in corpus (21)

• The EAGLE project: Simulating the evolution and assembly of galaxies and their environments
• The effect of photo-ionization on the cooling rates of enriched, astrophysical plasmas
• Chemical enrichment in cosmological, smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations
• The Dawes Review 2: Nucleosynthesis and stellar yields of low and intermediate-mass single stars
• Modelling discontinuities and Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities in SPH
• Chemical enrichment of galaxy clusters from hydrodynamical simulations
• Inviscid SPH
• The redshift evolution of massive galaxy clusters in the MACSIS simulations
• Solar abundance ratios of the iron-peak elements in the Perseus Cluster
• The uniformity and time-invariance of the intra-cluster metal distribution in galaxy clusters from the IllustrisTNG simulations
• A statistically-selected Chandra sample of 20 galaxy clusters -- II. Gas properties and cool-core/non-cool core bimodality
• A uniform metallicity in the outskirts of massive, nearby galaxy clusters
• Chemical evolution in Sersic 159-03 observed with XMM-Newton
• Metal enrichment processes
• The Metallicity of the Intracluster Medium Over Cosmic Time: Further Evidence for Early Enrichment
• Chemical Evolution on the Scale of Clusters of Galaxies: A Conundrum?
• CHEERS: The chemical evolution RGS sample
• Abundance and temperature distributions in the hot intra-cluster gas of Abell 4059
• The evolution of the spatially-resolved metal abundance in galaxy clusters up to z=1.4
• Iron in X-COP: tracing enrichment in cluster outskirts with high accuracy abundance profiles
• Uniform Contribution of Supernova Explosions to the Chemical Enrichment of Abell 3112 out to R200

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Ram Pressure Stripping in High-Density Environments
• Stellar splashback: the edge of the intracluster light
• Strongly lensed cluster substructures are not in tension with $\Lambda$CDM
• The Three Hundred Project: the evolution of physical baryon profiles
• Star Formation and Chemical Enrichment in Protoclusters
• Chemical enrichment in groups and clusters
• A search for the missing baryons with X--ray absorption lines towards the blazar 1ES 1553+113
• Core to Cosmic Edge: SIMBA-C's New Take on Abundance Profiles in the Intragroup Medium at z = 0