Reconstructing the radial profiles of gas density and temperature in clusters of galaxies from high-resolution X-ray and radio observations

Abstract

We describe a non-parametric method to reconstruct gas density and temperature profiles of galaxy clusters from observations of X-ray surface brightness, emission-weighted temperature and the y-parameter through the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. This method is based on the inversion of the projected profiles under the spherically symmetric approximation, which is independent of the equation of state of cluster gas and does not assume that the gas is in hydrostatic equilibrium. In particular we examine the reliability of the reconstruction method assuming a few theoretical models for cluster gas and assigning the statistical errors expected for future X-ray and radio observations. We also discuss briefly the effect of non-sphericity on the basis of simulated clusters.