Speaker
Description
The eROSITA telescope is revolutionizing X-ray astronomy with its ability to produce large all-sky surveys. eROSITA will catalog the hot intracluster medium (ICM) of thousands of galaxy clusters. This unprecedented sample of galaxy clusters is crucial for updating our theoretical understanding of the physics shaping the gaseous cores of clusters.
Inspired as a theoretical counterpart to eROSITA early science, we will present results of TNG-Cluster, a new cosmological magnetohydrodynamical simulation containing a sample of 352 massive galaxy clusters. We use this sample to give a census of the hot, X-ray luminous ICM at the center of cool-core (CC) and non-cool-core (NCC) clusters. We find that TNG-Cluster produces a variety of core properties that are similar to observed clusters. The core properties we study are not bimodally but unimodally distributed, suggesting that CCs and NCCs are not two distinct types of clusters.
We compare cool-core fractions with observational data, assess redshift evolution, and show preliminary results on the physical drivers and transformation mechanisms of cluster core states in this simulation.
Future work will directly compare TNG-Cluster to the first science results from eROSITA, and mock eROSITA-like observations of TNG-Cluster halos will enable numerous opportunities to compare and contrast the current state-of-the-art in both theory and data.
