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[89.03] Scaling Laws and the Mass and Temperature Functions of Galaxy Clusters

D.J. Horner (UMD/GSFC), R.F. Mushotzky (NASA/GSFC), Caleb Scharf (STScI)

Large, flux-limited samples of galaxy clusters are becoming available from searches based on ROSAT PSPC data either from the ROSAT All Sky Survey, e.g. the BCS (Ebeling et al. 1998) and RASS1 (de Grandi et al. 1998), or from serendipitous detections in pointed PSPC observations, e.g. WARPS (Scharf et al. 1997) and RDCS (Rosati et al. 1998). These samples have previously been used to determine the cluster x-ray luminosity function (XLF). We present preliminary results a method to determine the local temperature and mass functions using such samples by applying scaling laws between x-ray luminosity, temperature, and mass. Applying the luminosity-temperature relation, we derive the temperature function of clusters from ~1-10 keV. We then derive the mass function between few 10¹³ - 10¹⁵h^-1 M_\odot using a mass-temperature relation and constrain the total mass density in groups and clusters.

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