The SLUGGS Survey: revisiting the correlation between X-ray luminosity and total mass of massive early-type galaxies

2016/09/06 by Duncan A. Forbes, Adebusola Alabi, Aaron J. Romanowsky +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.GA #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.HE

paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/mnrasl/slw176

5 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS Letters

arxiv created 2016/09/06 · arxiv updated 2016/10/26

Abstract

Here we utilise recent measures of galaxy total dynamical mass and X-ray gas luminosities (L_X,Gas) for a sample of 29 massive early-type galaxies from the SLUGGS survey to probe L_X,Gas--mass scaling relations. In particular, we investigate scalings with stellar mass, dynamical mass within 5 effective radii (R_e) and total virial mass. We also compare these relations with predictions from ΛCDM simulations. We find a strong linear relationship between L_X,Gas and galaxy dynamical mass within 5 R_e, which is consistent with the recent cosmological simulations of Choi et al. that incorporate mechanical heating from AGN. We conclude that the gas surrounding massive early-type galaxies was shock heated as it fell into collapsing dark matter halos so that L_X,Gas is primarily driven by the depth of a galaxy's potential well. Heating by an AGN plays an important secondary role in determining L_X,Gas.

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