Gas clumping and its effect on hydrostatic bias in the MACSIS simulations

We use the MACSIS hydrodynamical simulations to estimate the extent of gas clumping in the intracluster medium of massive galaxy clusters and how it affects the hydrostatic mass bias. By comparing the clumping to the azimuthal scatter in the emission measure, an observational proxy, we find that they both increase with radius and are larger in higher mass and dynamically perturbed systems. Similar trends are also seen for the azimuthal temperature scatter and non-thermal pressure fraction, both of which correlate with density fluctuations, with these values also increasing with redshift. However, in agreement with recent work, we find only a weak correlation between the clumping, or its proxies, and the hydrostatic mass bias. To reduce the effect of clumping in the projected profiles, we compute the azimuthal median following recent observational studies, and find this reduces the scatter in the bias. We also attempt to correct the cluster masses by using a non-thermal pressure term and find overcorrected mass estimates (1 − b = 0.86 to 1 − b = 1.15) from 3D gas profiles but improved mass estimates (1 − b = 0.75 to 1 − b = 0.85) from projected gas profiles, with the caveat of systematically increased scatter. We conclude that the cluster-averaged mass bias is minimized from applying a non-thermal pressure correction (1 − b = 0.85) with more modest reductions from selecting clusters that have low clumping (1 − b = 0.79) or are dynamically relaxed (1 − b = 0.80). However, the latter selection is most effective at minimizing the scatter for individual objects. Such results can be tested with next-generation X-ray missions equipped with high-resolution spectrometers such as Athena.