Over-Luminous Elliptical Galaxies

Abstract

We have completed a first draft of a paper on the galaxy group ES03060170, the hottest known fossil group. We have submitted a first draft of the paper but the final completion is delayed due to several issues mentioned by the referee that we wish to revisit and discuss in more detail. The XMM data was combined with Chandra data which allowed a rich set of projects. The paper discusses the north-south elongation which is similar to that of the central dominant galaxy as well as the galaxy distribution. We detect an X-ray "finger" or small tail emanating from the central galaxy to the north, suggesting motion of the galaxy within the elongated gravitational potential. The overall agreement between XMM and Chandra data are excellent (although the XMM data extend to larger radii). Both data sets show a cool core centered on the dominant galaxy. Surprisingly, the temperature maps and detailed spectra indicate that the finger of gas is NOT cool, but has the same temperature as the ambient gas. We extracted surface brightness profiles, deprojected gas density profiles, cooling time profiles, and entropy profiles. There is a sharp discontinuity in gas temperature where the surface brightness profile starts to rise rapidly at 10 kpc. This produces a decrease in the cooling time and the gas entropy within 10 kpc. The central cooling time (within 10 kpc) is less than l0(exp 9) years and falls to almost half that value in the inner 5 kpc. Despite the very short cooling time, we find no evidence (even with the excellent statistics from XMM-Newton) for multi-phased gas, i.e., a cooling flow. We find two "edges" associated with the gas distribution (common in peaked X-ray groups and galaxies). On large scales, the temperature profile is flat and disagrees with the profile predicted by Loken et al. (2003) from detailed numerical simulations. We studied the galaxy distribution within one virial radius. The galaxy concentration associated with the group is detectable only within 0.3 of the virial radius (450 kpc) given the available depth of the optical galaxy catalogs at present. We have derived total mass and gas mass distributions (from the X- ray data) and find the gas fraction approaches a constant 8% (for Ho = 70).