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Session 37 - X-ray Clusters: Implications for Cosmology.
Display session, Tuesday, June 09
Atlas Ballroom,
Clusters of galaxies are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the universe. We therefore expect the baryonic mass fraction in a cluster to be a fair sample of the baryonic fraction of the universe, a conclusion which is supported by simulations. If the gas mass fraction is assumed to be constant, we can use any apparent change in the measured gas fraction between low and high redshift clusters to determine the value of the cosmological deceleration parameter q_0 (Pen 1997). We calculate the gas fraction for a sample of luminous (L_x > 10^45erg s^-1), nearby and distant (0.3 < z < 0.6) clusters using data from ASCA and ROSAT. We also determine the gas fraction using the method of Evrard, Metzler, amp; Navarro (1997) to find the total mass within the radius where the mass overdensity is 500 times the critical density. We present our determinations of q_0 from these two methods including both observational and systematic errors. This approach to determining q_0 depends on the apparent observed change in the gas fraction and not the value of the gas fraction itself, and hence it should be less susceptible to systematic effects.
