2016/05/24 by De Boni, Cristiano
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1605.08272
We are interested in investigating the growth of structures at the nonlinear scales of galaxy clusters from an observational perspective: we explore the possibility of measuring the mass accretion rate of galaxy clusters from their mass profile beyond the virial radius. We derive the accretion rate from the mass of a spherical shell whose infall velocity is extracted from N-body simulations. In the redshift range z=[0,2], our prescription returns an average mass accretion rate within 20-40 % of the average rate derived from the merger trees of dark matter haloes extracted from N-body simulations. Our result suggests that measuring the mean mass accretion rate of a sample of galaxy clusters is actually feasible, thus providing a new potential observational test of the cosmological and structure formation models.