The Chemical Evolution of Galaxy Clusters: Dissecting the Iron Mass Budget of the Intracluster Medium

Abstract

We study the chemical evolution of galaxy clusters by measuring the iron mass in the ICM after dissecting the abundance profiles into different components. We use Chandra archival observations of 186 morphologically regular clusters in the redshift range [0.04, 1.07]. For each cluster we compute the iron abundance and gas density profiles. We aim at identifying in the iron distribution a central peak associated with the BCG, and an approximately constant plateau associated with early enrichment. We are able to firmly identify the two components in a significant fraction of the sample, simply relying on the fit of the abundance profile. We compute the iron mass included in the iron peak and plateau, and the gas mass-weighted iron abundance out to $r_{500}$. While the iron plateau shows no evolution, we find marginal decrease with redshift in the iron peak. We measure that the fraction of iron peak mass is typically a few percent (~1%) of the total iron mass within $r_{500}$. Therefore, since the total iron mass budget is dominated by the plateau, we find consistently that the global gas mass-weighted iron abundance does not evolve significantly. We are also able to reproduce past claims of evolution in the global iron abundance, which turn out to be due to the use of cluster samples with different selection methods combined to the use of emission-weighted instead of gas mass-weighted abundance values. Finally, while the intrinsic scatter in the iron plateau mass is consistent with zero, the iron peak mass exhibits a large scatter, in line with the fact that the peak is produced after the virialization of the halo and depends on the formation of the hosting cool core and the associated feedback processes. We conclude that only a spatially-resolved approach can resolve the issue of the ICM iron evolution, reconciling the contradictory results obtained in the last ten years.