The temperature-mass relation in magnetized galaxy clusters

Abstract

We use cosmological, magneto-hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy clusters to quantify the dynamical importance of magnetic fields in these clusters. The set-up of initial magnetic field strengths at high redshifts is chosen such that observed Faraday-rotation measurements in low-redshift clusters are well reproduced in the simulations. We compute the radial profiles of the intracluster gas temperature and of the thermal and magnetic pressure in a set of clusters simulated in the framework of an Einstein-de Sitter and a low-density, spatially-flat CDM cosmological model. We find that, for a realistic range of initial magnetic field strengths, the temperature of the intracluster gas changes by less than ~5%