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E. De Filippis (MIT), M. Sereno (Universita' di Napoli Federico II), M. W. Bautz (MIT)
In a recent paper we have discussed a method to constrain the intrinsic triaxial shape of galaxy clusters using combined X-Ray and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich observations. We have analyzed a sample of galaxy clusters with measured Sunyaev-Zel'dovich temperature decrements. A large majority of the clusters in our sample exhibits a marked triaxial structure, with the spherical hypothesis widely rejected. The sample turns out to be slightly biased, with the strongly elongated clusters preferentially aligned toward the line of sight, a clear example of how deeply X-Ray selected cluster samples are affected by morphological and orientation issues. Our results are in agreement with most recent cosmological N-body simulations.
We will discuss our most recent results, putting the main strength on the effect that the pronounced triaxial morphology of clusters has on the deprojection of temperature and metal abundance profiles and on the estimate of their gas and total mass profiles, with respect to the conventional more generic assumption of spherical symmetry.
This work is supported by NASA grants NAS8-39073 and NAS8-00128.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.