paper

Scaling Mass Profiles around Elliptical Galaxies Observed with Chandra and XMM-Newton

arXiv:astro-ph/0509521 · doi:10.1086/498081

Abstract

We investigated the dynamical structure of 53 elliptical galaxies, based on the {\it Chandra} archival X-ray data. In X-ray luminous galaxies, a temperature increases with radius and a gas density is systematically higher at the optical outskirts, indicating a presence of a significant amount of the group-scale hot gas. In contrast, X-ray dim galaxies show a flat or declining temperature profile against radius and the gas density is relatively lower at the optical outskirts. Thus it is found that X-ray bright and faint elliptical galaxies are clearly distinguished by the temperature and gas density profile. The mass profile is well scaled by a virial radius rather than an optical-half radius , and is quite similar at between X-ray luminous and dim galaxies, and smoothly connects to those of clusters of galaxies. At the inner region of or , the mass profile well traces a stellar mass with a constant mass-to-light ratio of . ratio of X-ray bright galaxies rises up steeply beyond , and thus requires a presence of massive dark matter halo. From the deprojection analysis combined with the {\it XMM-Newton} data, we found that X-ray dim galaxies, NGC 3923, NGC 720, and IC 1459, also have a high ratio of 20--30 at 20 kpc, comparable to that of X-ray luminous galaxies. Therefore, dark matter is indicated to be common in elliptical galaxies, and their distribution almost follows the NFW profile, as well as galaxy clusters.

33 pages, 11 figures, to appear in ApJ 636 No.2, ApJ 10 January 2006

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