# The effect of radiative cooling on the X-ray properties of galaxy clusters.

## 1 Introduction

Clusters of galaxies are the largest virialised structures in the Universe, evolving rapidly at recent times in many popular cosmological models. Even at moderate redshifts the number of large dark matter halos in a cold dark matter Universe with a significant, positive cosmological constant is higher than in a standard cold dark matter Universe and it is precisely because both the number density and size of large dark matter halos evolve at different rates in popular cosmological models that observations of galaxy clusters provide an important discriminator between rival cosmologies.

The advent of X-ray satellites opened up a whole new area in observational astronomy. Hot gas, typically at temperatures of $`10^{78}K`$ sitting in the deep potential wells of galaxy clusters emits radiation via thermal bremsstrahlung. This emission is heavily biased towards the central regions of the cluster because the flux is weighted as the gas density squared. Given the gas temperature and the X-ray surface brightness, the gas column density and a spherically symmetric gas density profile can be estimated. If the hot gas is assumed to reside close to hydrostatic equilibrium within the dark matter halo the underlying dark matter density distribution can be derived. 

Since the early work of Abramopoulos & Ku (1983) and Jones & Forman (1984) on the radial density profiles of large galaxy clusters, debate has raged about the presence or absence of large, $`250h^1kpc`$, constant density cores in the X-ray emitting gas. Unfortunately X-ray imaging is notoriously difficult because of the inherent large beam size. In addition, the centre of the emission region is not easy to determine and any centering error also acts to smooth out any central increase when the results are azimuthally averaged and plotted as a radial profile (Beers & Tonry 1986). More recent high resolution images of several clusters have helped to resolve this controversy. Some galaxy clusters do indeed appear to exhibit a large, resolved core but others have a much smaller core, close to the resolution threshold of the instrument. Both White, Jones & Forman (1997) (who studied 207 clusters imaged by the Einstein observatory) and Peres et al. (1998) (who looked at ROSAT observations of the flux-limited sample of clusters provided by Edge et al. 1990) suggest that this dichotomy relies on the presence or absence of a cooling flow. Clusters with a cooling flow appear to have small cores (around $`50h^1kpc`$) whilst clusters without cooling flows have much larger cores. The work of Allen (1998) on the discrepancy between the large X-ray core radii and the small core radii deduced from strong lensing observations (e.g. Kneib et al. 1996) also reached the conclusion that cooling flow type clusters had small core radii in their matter distributions. Because the X-ray flux rises as the local density squared, the total X-ray emission from a cluster is very sensitive to the central density.

High resolution N-body simulations of galaxy clusters (Moore et al. 1998) produce a radial dark matter profile that has no core. The radial profile continues to rise until the resolution threshold is reached, well within the required radius if the gas is to trace the dark matter and still reproduce the X-ray observations. The production of a central constant density dark matter core has been a long standing problem for collisionless dark matter simulations (Pearce, Thomas & Couchman 1993, Navarro & White 1994), although in previous work the resolution threshold was still close to the observed core sizes and so until the latest high resolution studies this was still a tentative result.

Recently several groups have tried to reconstruct the radial temperature profile of galaxy clusters. Markevitch et al. (1998) used ASCA data from 30 clusters and concluded that the temperature falls steeply at large radii. However, Irwin, Bregman & Evrard (1999) analysed ROSAT PSPC images of 26 clusters and concluded that the radial temperature profiles were generally flat out to the virial radius.

The inclusion of a gaseous component into simulations allows the previously assumed relationship between the gas and the dark matter to be derived directly. The first study of this type (Evrard 1990) was carried out without the effects of radiative cooling but reproduced well many theoretical predictions such as a bias between the dark matter and the baryonic material. Similar non-cooling simulations have proved popular (Cen & Ostriker 1994, Kang et al. 1994, Bryan et al. 1994, Navarro, Frenk & White 1995, Bartelmann & Steinmetz 1996, Eke, Navarro & Frenk 1998, Bryan & Norman 1998) and such a simulation formed the basis of the Santa Barbara project in which a dozen groups simulated the formation of the same galaxy cluster (Frenk et al. 1999).

Extending this work to include a dissipative component has proved difficult because the formation of galaxies introduces many additional physical effects. Metzler & Evrard (1994) and Evrard, Metzler & Navarro (1996) circumvented this by introducing a galactic component by hand into a simulation that didn’t follow radiative cooling of the gas to study the effects of feedback on the cluster profile. Fully consistent attempts to follow the radiative cooling of the hot intra-cluster gas have only recently been achievable because of the extra computational overhead involved. Early attempts to include the effects of radiative cooling (Thomas & Couchman 1992, Katz & White 1993, Evrard, Summers & Davis 1994, Frenk et al. 1996) either suffered from poor resolution, focussed on the galactic population or suffered from overmerging effects.

In a now classic paper Katz & White (1993) examined the effect of radiative cooling on the X-ray profile of a single galaxy cluster, a study repeated recently by Lewis et al. (1999). Their simulated cluster has properties that are not observed; a Virgo sized cluster with a super-massive central galaxy and an enormous $`400\mathrm{M}_{}/\mathrm{yr}`$ associated cooling flow. As they point out, massive brightest cluster galaxies of this size are observed within the Universe, as are massive cooling flows, however they fail to stress their rarity, particularly in objects of similar size to the Virgo cluster. More recently Suginohara & Ostriker (1998) simulated a different cluster and also produced an object which has properties they themselves admit are unobserved – “The high resolution simulation resulted in a gas density profile steeply rising toward the center, with consequent very high X-ray luminosity; however, these properties are not observed”. They suggest that feedback of energy from supernovae might account for the discrepancy. In this paper, we obtain quite different results because, unlike previous studies, a realistic fraction of the baryonic material has cooled to form galaxies. Large, bright central cluster galaxies can have a dramatic effect on the cluster potential and consequently the X-ray properties. A reasonable treatment of these objects is extremely important in studies of this type. To prevent too much material cooling to form the central object within each halo we employ a modified form of smoothed-particle hydrodynamics — this will be described further in Section 2, below.

If the effects of cooling are included in the models then one might expect the entropy of the intracluster medium to decrease. Paradoxically, several mechanisms have been suggested that may produce large, constant-density gas cores by *raising* the entropy of the gas at the centre of the cluster:

* Radiative cooling is very efficient in small dark matter halos because the cooling time is less than the dynamical time (White & Rees 1978). These knots of cold, dense gas can be equated with proto-galaxies and, as they are dense and collapsing, they may be reasonably expected to produce stars (Katz 1992). Star formation leads to energy feedback into the interstellar medium via supernovae explosions (Katz 1992, Mihos & Hernquist 1994, Navarro & White 1994, Gerritsen & Icke 1997). Unless the gas immediately recools, this heating acts to increase the entropy of the surrounding material, pushing it onto a higher adiabat and preventing it settling to the very high densities and temperatures required for it to trace the underlying dark matter (Wu, Fabian & Nulsen 1998).
* The presence of galaxies orbiting within the cluster potential acts to stir up the gas, heating it as friction and turbulence dissipate the galaxies’ velocity, simultaneously producing velocity and spatial bias in the galaxy distribution (Frenk et al. 1996). This effect is most pronounced in the centre of the cluster.
* A third mechanism for producing a core is that radiative cooling of the gas at the centre of each potential well acts as a drain on the low entropy material (which cools preferentially). If the remaining gas cannot cool rapidly enough, a core would develop because only high entropy material remains, an effect postulated in the first paper to include radiative cooling (Thomas & Couchman 1992) and later reiterated by Waxman & Miralda-Escude (1995) and Bower (1997). It is this mechanism that we investigate in this paper. We show that the entropy of the intracluster medium is indeed increased, that this leads to a greatly reduced X-ray luminosity, but that it does *not* give a large, constant-density core.

The remainder of this paper is laid out as follows: in Section 2 we present the large hydrodynamical simulations, both with and without the effects of radiative cooling, that we have performed; in Section 3 we extract radial density and temperature profiles for the 20 largest galaxy clusters within each simulation and contrast the profiles with the underlying dark matter distribution; this is followed in Section 4 by a discussion of our findings.

## 2 The simulations

The simulations that we have carried out use the adaptive particle-particle, particle-mesh (AP<sup>3</sup>M) method (Couchman 1991) coupled to the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) technique (Gingold & Monaghan 1977, Lucy 1977) to follow 2 million gas and 2 million dark matter particles in a box of side $`100Mpc`$ (Couchman, Thomas & Pearce 1995, Pearce & Couchman 1997).

We have performed simulations in two types of flat cold dark matter cosmology, one standard (SCDM) and one with a cosmological constant ($`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$CDM), with the same parameters assumed by Jenkins et al. (1998) ($`\mathrm{\Omega }=1.0`$, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }=0.0`$, h=0.5, $`\sigma _8=0.6`$ for the former and $`\mathrm{\Omega }=0.3`$, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }=0.7`$, h=0.7, $`\sigma _8=0.9`$ for the latter). The baryon fraction was set from Big Bang nucleosynthesis constraints, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2=0.015`$ (Copi, Schramm & Turner 1995) and we have assumed an unevolving gas metallicity of 0.3 times the solar value. These parameters produce a gas mass per particle of $`2\times 10^9\mathrm{M}_{}`$ in each case and are summarised in Table 1. The dark matter mass is only slightly lower than that given by Steinmetz & White (1997—their Equation 9, but note that there is a typographical error) at which artificial 2-body heating balances radiative cooling. Thus we expect there to be some numerical heating in our simulations. However, as we have chosen to neglect real heat sources, such as supernovae in galaxies, this is of little importance and does not affect our conclusions which concern the differences between runs with and without radiative cooling.

Since we smooth over 32 SPH particles, the smallest gaseous object that can be effectively resolved has a mass of $`6.4\times 10^{10}\mathrm{M}_{}`$. We employ a comoving $`\beta `$-spline gravitational softening equivalent to a Plummer softening of $`10h^1kpc`$ for redshifts $`0<z<1.5`$ (2.5 for $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$CDM)—at earlier times the softening has a fixed physical size, with the minimum SPH resolution set to match this. We note that a spatial resolution of $`10h^1kpc`$ is over twice the typical scale length of elliptical galaxies and this may lead to enhanced tidal disruption, drag and merging within the largest clusters of objects. However, the force softening cannot be reduced further without introducing 2-body effects. A smaller softening would also lead to a further increase in the number of timesteps required; we already require around 10000 for each cooling run.

In addition to these two simulations which both included the effects of radiative cooling, we repeated the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$CDM model without cooling. This simulation has input parameters close to those used by Eke, Navarro & Frenk (1998) who used the same cosmology and the resultant clusters look very similar and exhibit similar X-ray properties (see Fig. 7 for a comparison).

The properties of the galaxies in the two simulations with radiative cooling have been described in Pearce et al. (1999, 2000). They clearly demonstrate an acceptable match to both the spatial and luminosity distribution of observed galaxies. This was achieved by employing three numerical approximations: a mass-resolution of $`6.4\times 10^{10}\mathrm{M}_{}`$ below which objects cannot cool efficiently, a length-resolution (ie softening) of $`10h^1kpc`$, and decoupling of the hot, halo gas from the cold galactic gas. Improving the mass and/or length resolution would increase the fraction of cold gas in our simulations, producing galaxies that were too luminous to match the observations. This would then necessitate the introduction of feedback mechanisms that would over-complicate our model.

Decoupling the hot halo gas is a new innovation that we feel vastly improves the ability of SPH to model fluids in which there are large density contrasts. Without it, hot gas particles have their density overestimated in the vicinity of cold gas and too much material cools to form the central galaxy. Normal cooling of the intracluster medium at temperatures above $`10^5`$K is still handled correctly and galaxy-galaxy mergers and viscous drag on the galaxies as they orbit within the halo are retained. As Pearce et al. (1999) show, such a procedure produces a set of galaxies that fit the local K-band number counts of Gardner et al. (1997). The brightest cluster galaxies contained within the largest halos are not excessively luminous for a volume of this size, unlike those found in previous work (Katz & White 1993, Lewis et al. 1999). The fraction of the baryonic material that cools into galaxies within the virial radius of the large halos in our simulation is listed in Tables 3 & 4 and is typically around 20 percent. This is much less than the unphysically high value of 40 percent reported by Katz & White (1993). Decoupling of the hot phase produces a galactic population and cold gas fraction that is well matched to the observations.

## 3 Results

### 3.1 Extracting objects

For the purposes of this paper we are interested in only the largest objects within each simulation, as only these contain sufficient mass to produce the deep potential wells required to retain hot, X-ray emitting gas. We centre each cluster on the peak of the hot gas density, a position that coincides with the centre of the X-ray emission. This prevents the introduction of an artificial constant-density core which may arise with any other choice of centre — for clusters with significant substructure the centre-of-mass can lie a long way from the centre of the X-ray emission.

The virial radius for each of our clusters was defined as the spherical region, surrounding each cluster centre, that enclosed an overdensity of 178 for SCDM and 324 for $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$CDM (Eke, Cole & Frenk 1996). Each catalogue was then cleaned by ordering it in size and deleting the smaller of any overlapping clusters. The 20 most massive clusters in each of the catalogues were then used for the work presented here. The properties of the clusters are presented in Tables 2–4. The 16 largest clusters found in the non-cooling simulation are found in the list of the 20 largest clusters in the other two models. The index of the matching cluster from the non-cooling run is given in Tables 3 & 4.

Each of the extracted clusters was checked for substructure by comparing the centre of the X-ray emission to the median position of the particles within the virial radius, a statistic that has been shown to be a useful indicator of the presence of substructure by Thomas et al. (1998). The results of this test are shown in Tables 2–4. All the clusters with an offset of more than 7 percent of the virial radius (6 in each case) were noted and are shown as dotted lines on Figures 1, 3, 4, 5 & 6 and as open symbols on Figure 7.

### 3.2 Dark matter density profiles

The radial dark matter density profiles for the 20 largest objects in each cosmology are shown in Figure 1. Shown is the mean density within spherical shells, the innermost shell plotted in the Figure containing at least 64 particles. The dark matter profiles of those clusters without significant substructure are similar within each cosmology. In the non-cooling run, the innermost bin of each density profile shows a flattening. This is a resolution effect: the radial extent of the bin has to be very large in order to accommodate 64 particles.

Both gas and dark matter density profiles for the largest object in each of the runs are shown in Figure 2. The dark matter profile for the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$CDM run without cooling is reasonably well fit by an NFW profile (Navarro, Frenk & White 1997). With cooling the dark matter density profile of the clusters is not well fit by the NFW formula, because the asymptotic slope in the central regions is steeper than -1. This is because, once cooling has been implemented, the large galaxy that forms at the centre of each cluster acts to draw in more dark matter and steepen the profile significantly in the inner regions. A similar effect is seen for most of the other clusters, although in the cooling run several show a drop in density in the innermost bin. This indicates that the peak X-ray emissivity sometimes comes from a galaxy that is not located at the centre of the cluster.

### 3.3 Gas entropy profiles

Gas entropy profiles (and also density and temperature profiles, below) were obtained using only those particles with a temperature exceeding $`\mathrm{12\hspace{0.17em}000}K`$. Typical gas temperatures exceed $`10^7K`$ for halos in this mass range and we wish to exclude cold gas which lies within galaxies or recently tidally disrupted objects. If the cold material were included, there would be a large density spike at the centre of each of the clusters (which all have a central galaxy). This object does not contribute to the X-ray emission because the material it contains is very cold compared to the surrounding hot halo (although the increased depth of the local potential can help to confine dense, hot gas which can affect the bolometric X-ray emission). The specific entropy profile is shown in Figure 3. We plot the quantity $`(T/K)/(\rho /\overline{\rho })^{2/3}`$, where $`T`$ is the temperature and $`\rho `$ the density, measured in units of the mean gas density, $`\overline{\rho }`$.

Let us contrast the results for the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$CDM runs with and without cooling. Firstly, note that the entropy at the virial radii is very similar in each case—this is because cooling has had little effect at these large radii. Between the virial radius and about 0.2 times the virial radius (less for the largest cluster), the entropy profiles for the cooling run are shallower than in the non-cooling run. This confirms the hypothesis of Thomas & Couchman (1992) that cooling is able to *raise* the entropy of the intracluster medium by dragging in high-entropy material from the outer regions of the cluster.

Within about 0.2 virial radii, the entropy profiles again steepen—it is within this “cooling radius” that the cooling time is short enough to allow significant cooling of the gas within the lifetime of the cluster. By the time we get to the innermost bins in the Figure, there seems to be a spread in the entropy of the clusters in the cooling run, with some having higher entropy and some lower entropy than the corresponding clusters in the non-cooling run.

The SCDM run with cooling exhibits similar entropy profiles to the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$CDM run with cooling.

### 3.4 Gas density profiles

The radial gas density profiles are displayed in Figure 4. Without cooling these profiles look very similar to those obtained by Eke et al. (1998). Within about 0.1 virial radii, the gas profiles are significantly shallower than the corresponding dark matter profiles of Figure 1. This is indicative of the fact that the hot gas has a higher specific energy than the dark matter and, as previous authors have found (e.g. Navarro et al. 1995, Eke et al. 1998), there is more dark matter than gas (relative to the cosmic mean) within the virial radius. There is a general tendency for all the profiles to flatten considerably in the innermost bin. Once again, this is due to inadequate resolution and we do not attach any significance to it.

The effect of cooling is to *lower* the gas density at all radii within the virial radius. The suppression is greatest, a factor of three, at about 0.1 times the virial radius, roughly corresponding to the kink in the entropy profiles seen in Figure 3. Although the density gradients are shallower, they do not roll over into constant-density inner core regions. In fact, for the larger clusters, the density continues to rise further into the centre of the cluster than before, so that the central density is close to that in the non-cooling case.

The profile of the largest object in both gas and dark matter for each of the runs is shown in Figure 2. The arrow indicates a radius of 100 $`h^1`$kpc. Without cooling, the gas density is shallower than that of the dark matter within 0.1 times the virial radius, but this inner, resolved slope of the density profile is still $`\rho r^1`$ with no sign of a constant-density core. As the temperature is approximately constant within this region (see Figure 5), the X-ray luminosity is convergent and dominated by emission from around 200 $`h^1`$kpc (0.1 times the virial radius).

With cooling, the largest cluster exhibits a central density spike due to the presence of a massive central galaxy. This hot gas has a very steep radial density profile, $`\rho r^3`$, and would be classified observationally as a cooling flow of $`60h^2\mathrm{M}_{}`$/yr onto the central cluster galaxy. Between radii of about 40 $`h^1`$kpc and 1 $`h^1`$Mpc, the density profile is a power law, $`\rho r^{1.4}`$, steepening at larger radii. Thus the X-ray luminosity (excluding the cooling flow) comes from a much more extended region than in the non-cooling case.

In conclusion, the gas density has been reduced by the influx of high-entropy material, as expected. However, this has not given rise to constant-density inner cores. In fact, if anything, the density profiles now continue as a power-law closer into the centre of the clusters.

### 3.5 Radial temperature profiles

Radial temperature profiles are shown in Figure 5. The temperature profiles for the relaxed clusters from the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$CDM run without cooling are typical of those found in previous work (see for example Eke et al. 1998 and references therein). They rise inwards from the virial radius by about a factor of two, peaking at about 0.1 times the virial radius and then declining again, very gradually, in the cluster centre.

Cooling makes little difference to the temperature profiles, except that corresponding clusters in the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$CDM runs reach a *higher* peak temperature when cooling is implemented, due to the inflow of higher entropy gas. The temperatures are very similar at the virial radius, but are about 1.5 times higher at their peak than before. Two clusters show a precipitous decline in temperature in the cluster centre, one of these being the largest cluster—this is evidence for a cooling flow.

The SCDM results are very similar to those for $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$CDM.

### 3.6 X-ray luminosity profiles

We follow Navarro et al. (1995) in using the following estimator for the bolometric X-ray luminosity of a cluster,

$$L_X=4\times 10^{32}\left(\frac{\rho _i}{\overline{\rho }}\right)\left(\frac{T_i}{K}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}\mathrm{erg}\mathrm{s}^1$$
(1)   
where the density is in units of overdensity (relative to the mean gas density in the box, 2.86$`\times 10^{31}`$g/cm<sup>3</sup>) and the sum extends over all the gas particles with temperatures above $`12000K`$.

The total X-ray luminosity within the virial radius of each of the clusters is listed in Tables 2–4. For the simulation with cooling the clusters are several times less luminous than those from the corresponding non-cooling run. This contradicts the previous results of Katz & White (1993), Suginohara & Ostriker (1998) and Lewis et al. (1999) who all found the X-ray luminosity increased if cooling was turned on. The reason for the discrepancy is, once again, the fact that we have decoupled the hot and cold gas, thus greatly suppressing the cooling of the inflowing, high-entropy gas in our simulations compared to previous ones. This causes a large reduction in the mass of the brightest cluster galaxy compared to those produced by previous work. Our galaxies have reasonable luminosities, mass-to-light ratios and number counts for a volume of this size.

Note that estimates of X-ray luminosity from the non-cooling run are not really meaningful. A radiation rate of this magnitude can only be sustained for a short time before depleting the intracluster medium of gas. The cooling runs produce a more physically self-consistent X-ray luminosity because the radiative effects are taken into account. The X-ray luminosity within the cooling radius is approximately equal to the enthalpy of the gas divided by the age of the cluster.

We plot these bolometric luminosities as a function of radius for each of our clusters in Figure 6. Clearly the relative contribution to the total X-ray emission from different radii is very different for the cooling and non-cooling simulations. Without cooling all the relaxed clusters show very similar emission profiles, with only a small contribution to the total emission coming from the very centre. These profiles are mostly well resolved, as claimed by Eke et al. (1998) for simulations of clusters with this particle number.

Once radiative cooling is turned on the radial emission profiles span a much broader range. For two of the clusters, a central cooling flow type emission is clearly visible — contributing 50 percent and 80 percent of the total X-ray flux. Although the cooling flow region is not well-resolved, it cannot be much larger without depleting the intracluster medium of even more gas. For each of the other clusters, the radius enclosing half of the total emission is much larger than that for the simulation without cooling.

### 3.7 $`L_X`$$`T_X`$ relation

There has been much debate in the literature centering on the X-ray cluster $`L_X`$ versus $`T_X`$ correlation. The emission weighted mean temperature is plotted against the bolometric luminosity within the virial radius for all our clusters in Figure 7. The filled symbols represent the relaxed clusters and the open symbols denote those clusters that show significant substructure.

The effect of cooling is, in general, to slightly raise the temperature but to greatly reduce the X-ray luminosity. Exceptions are the cooling flow clusters where the large amount of emission from gas cooling onto the central galaxy gives rise to a lower temperature than in the non-cooling case. There are two of these, easily visible on the plot, in the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$CDM run; we have plotted their new locations, when the central cooling flow is omitted, using crosses linked to the old location via arrows. In both cases less than 2 percent of the hot, X-ray emitting particles were excised to make this calculation (606 for cluster $`\mathrm{\Lambda }1`$ and 20 for cluster $`\mathrm{\Lambda }5`$). In the case of $`\mathrm{\Lambda }5`$ we have caught a transient event - a small amount of gas has been reheated by a merger between a satellite and the brightest cluster galaxy. This gas is in the process of rapidly cooling back onto the central object, emitting large amounts of X-rays.

All 3 sets of clusters display a positive correlation between $`L_X`$ and $`T_X`$, although there are insufficient numbers to tie the trend down very tightly. It is clear from the comments in the preceding paragraph that the nature of the correlation depends critically upon whether one removes the cooling flow emission or not. We believe that a clearer picture arises if this is done.

The regression line in Figure 7 is from Eke et al.  (1998) and corresponds to $`L_XT_X^2`$. Our non-cooling clusters fit reasonably well with this relation. The cooling clusters lie below this line. Given that we expect cooling to be less important in the most massive clusters (the absolute value of the cooling time and the ratio of the cooling time to the dynamical time both increase with cluster mass), then we would expect the clusters with radiative cooling to lie closer to the regression line at higher $`T_X`$. Thus the effect of cooling should be to steepen the $`L_X`$$`T_X`$ relation. We hope to test this with more simulations of higher mass clusters.

Also plotted in Figure 7 are the observed data from David et al. (1995). Our clusters are smaller and cooler because they are not very massive (due to our relatively small computational volume), thus it is hard to assess whether the cooling or the non-cooling clusters give a better fit to the data. SCDM clusters, at least with the simulation parameters we have chosen in this paper, do not seem to provide such a good match to the data.

## 4 Conclusions and discussion

We have performed two N-body plus hydrodynamics simulations of structure formation within a volume of side $`100Mpc`$, including the effects of radiative cooling but neglecting star formation and feedback. By repeating one of the simulations without radiative cooling of the gas, we can both compare to previous work and study the changes caused by the cooling. A summary of our conclusions follows.

(a) Without cooling our clusters closely resemble those found by previous authors (Eke et al. 1998 and references therein), with dark matter density profiles that closely follow the universal formula proposed by Navarro et al. (1995).

(b) With cooling, the formation of a central galaxy within each halo acts to steepen the dark matter profile, supporting the conclusion of the lensing studies (e.g. Kneib et al. 1996) that the underlying potential that forms the lens has a small core. This galaxy may not be located exactly at the centre of the X-ray emission, sometimes being offset by up to $`50h^1kpc`$. The inner slope of the density profile is then steeper than that suggested by NFW, closer to that found by Moore et al. (1998) from high resolution N-body simulations (but note that these did not include cooling gas).

(c) We confirm the results of Eke et al. (1998) (and previous studies quoted therein) that without radiative cooling the gas density profile turns over at small radii, that the radial temperature profile drops by a factor of two between its peak value and that obtained at the virial radius and that the baryon fraction within the virial radius is lower than the cosmic mean.

(d) Cooling acts to remove low-entropy gas from near the cluster centre, triggering the inflow of higher entropy material. The entropy excess compared with the non-cooling run is greatest at about 0.2 times the virial radius, because radiative cooling lowers the entropy of the gas near the centre of the cluster.

(e) We stress the importance of correctly modelling the central cluster galaxy. The resultant X-ray properties of the cluster are very dependant upon the centre and if too much material cools into the base of the potential well large amounts of hot, dense gas can be confined, producing enormous X-ray fluxes. We have specifically tailored our models to both globally cool a reasonable fraction of material and to circumvent problems encountered by SPH when faced with large density jumps which can lead to high rates of gas cooling onto the central objects.

(f) In cooling clusters, the gas density is reduced, by a maximum of about a factor of three at 0.1–0.2 times the virial radius. The density profile more closely resembles a power-law than in the non-cooling run. A few clusters show a central density spike, indicative of a cooling flow onto the central cluster galaxy (e.g. Fabian, Nulsen & Canizares 1991).

(g) The temperatures of the cooling clusters show a significant fall between the point where the peak values are obtained (around 0.1 virial radii) and the virial radius. The observational evidence is somewhat divided here. Our results are in agreement with Markevitch et al. (1998) who find that the temperature profile of galaxy clusters are steeply falling. However, Irwin et al. (1999) recover isothermal temperature profiles out to the virial radius from an averaged sample of 26 ROSAT clusters. It is important to try to clear up this observational controversy as isothermal temperature profiles are not seen in our models but are often used for X-ray mass estimates, measurements of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_b`$ (and hence $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$) and theoretical arguments for the $`L_X`$$`T_X`$ relation.

(h) Cooling acts so as to *increase* both the mass-weighted and observed X-ray temperatures of clusters. The peak temperatures are raised by a factor of about 1.5 and the temperature gradient between the peak and the virial radius is correspondingly increased.

(i) The bolometric luminosity for the clusters with radiative cooling is around 3–5 times *lower* than for matching clusters without it. Except for the cooling flow clusters, the X-ray luminosity profile is less centrally concentrated than in the non-cooling case with a greater contribution coming from larger radii.

(j) Cooling flow clusters are easily distinguished from non-cooling flow clusters in the $`L_X`$$`T_X`$ plane. The former are more luminous and cooler than the latter (Fabian et al 1994, Allen & Fabian 1998). Some of this difference results from X-ray analysis methods (Allen & Fabian 1998) but may also be caused by actual physical differences in the mass distribution of clusters. We suggest that, while interpretation of this relation would be made simpler if the cooling flow were excluded before determining the X-ray properties of clusters, this should be done with caution.

(k) The clusters from the non-cooling simulation lie on the $`L_XT_X^2`$ regression line of Eke et al.  (1988), whereas those from the cooling run lie below it. We suggest that, as cooling is likely to be less important in more massive clusters, the effect of cooling will be to steepen the relation. This remains to be tested with simulations of more massive clusters.

(l) The very large core radii ($`250h^1kpc`$) observed in some clusters are not seen in our simulations. It is possible that such events are rare, or occur preferentially in massive clusters, in which case our cluster sample may simply be too small to contain such objects. Smaller core radii of around $`50h^1kpc`$ are close to our resolution limit and so are not ruled out by our results, although we find no evidence for a constant-density region in the centre of any of our clusters.

At this point, we should remind the reader that our simulations are designed merely to investigate the effect of radiative cooling on the X-ray properties of the intracluster medium and do not set out to explore the complete range of physical processes going on in clusters. In particular, we ignore the possibility of energy injection into the intracluster medium. Early star formation at high redshift and the subsequent energy feedback from supernovae could act to preheat the gas which falls into the potential wells of galaxy clusters, effectively raising its entropy to such a level that it cannot reside at the high densities required to trace the dark matter into the base of the potential well, and giving rise to the constant-density cores that our simulated clusters lack. Ponman, Cannon & Navarro (1999) argue for such preheating by examining ROSAT observations of 25 clusters.

The inclusion of cooling into a cosmological hydrodynamics simulation has proved highly successful. We have highlighted the necessity of cooling reasonable amounts of gas onto the centre of each galaxy cluster if sensible X-ray luminosity estimates are to be obtained. We have achieved this by a judicious choice of mass resolution and decoupling the hot and cold gas phases. A rigorous method of doing this in SPH is under development. We next intend to simulate more massive clusters in the same way, in order to extend our predictions into regions more accessible to observation.

## Acknowledgments

The work presented in this paper was carried out as part of the programme of the Virgo Supercomputing Consortium using computers based at the Computing Centre of the Max-Planck Society in Garching and at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. The authors thank NATO for providing NATO Collaborative Research Grant CRG 970081 which facilitated their interaction and the anonymous referee for suggesting significant improvements. PAT is a PPARC Lecturer Fellow.