THE UNUSUALLY HIGH HALO CONCENTRATION OF THE FOSSIL GROUP NGC 6482: EVIDENCE FOR WEAK ADIABATIC CONTRACTION

David A. Buote
2017 Astrophysical Journal  
We revisit the massive isolated elliptical galaxy / fossil group NGC 6482 for which previous X-ray studies of a modest Chandra observation obtained a very uncertain, but also possibly very high, halo concentration. We present new measurements of the hot gas surface brightness, temperature, and iron abundance using the modest Chandra observation and a previously unpublished Suzaku observation, the latter of which allows measurements of the gas properties to be extended out to r_2500. By
more » ... ing hydrostatic equilibrium models of the gas with separate components for the gas, BCG stellar mass, and the dark matter (DM), we measure c_200 = 32.2 +/- 7.1 and M_200 = (4.5 +/- 0.6 x 10^12 M_sun using an NFW DM profile. For a halo of this mass, c_200 exceeds the mean value (7.1) expected for relaxed LCDM halos by 3.5 σ in terms of the observational error, and by 6 σ considering the intrinsic scatter in the LCDM c-M relation, which situates NGC 6482 as the most extreme outlier known for a fossil system. We explored several variants of adiabatic contraction (AC) models and, while the AC models provide fits of the same quality as the un-contracted models, they do have the following advantages: (1) smaller c_200 that is less of an outlier in the LCDM c-M relation, and (2) baryon fractions that agree better with the mean cosmic value. While the standard AC prescriptions yield a BCG stellar mass that is uncomfortably small compared to results from stellar population synthesis (SPS) models, a weaker AC variant that artificially shuts off cooling and star formation at z=2 yields the same stellar mass as the un-contracted models. For these reasons, we believe our X-ray analysis prefers this weaker AC variant applied to either an NFW or Einasto DM halo. Finally, the BCG stellar mass strongly favors SPS models with a Chabrier or Kroupa IMF over a Salpeter IMF. (Abridged)
doi:10.3847/1538-4357/834/2/164 fatcat:nspln5fienemjhgypjxpfq6kia