A Study of Gas Entropy Profiles of 47 Galaxy Clusters and Groups out to the Virial Radius

Some observations, such as those presented in Walker et al., show that the observed entropy profiles of the intracluster medium (ICM) deviate from the power-law prediction of adiabatic simulations. This implies that nongravitational processes, which are absent in the simulations, may be important in the evolution of the ICM, and by quantifying the deviation, we may be able to estimate the feedback energy in the ICM and use it as a probe of the nongravitational processes. To address this issue, we calculate the ICM entropy profiles in a sample of 47 galaxy clusters and groups, which have been observed out to at least ∼r ₅₀₀ with Chandra, XMM-Newton, and/or Suzaku, by constructing a physical model to incorporate the effects of both gravity and nongravitational processes to fit the observed gas temperature and surface brightness profiles via Bayesian statistics. After carefully evaluating the effects of systematic errors, we find that the gas entropy profiles derived with best-fit results of our model are consistent with the simulation-predicted power-law profile near the virial radius, while the flattened profiles reported previously can be explained by introducing the gas clumping effect, the existence of which is confirmed in 19 luminous targets in our sample. We calculate the total feedback energy per particle and find that it decreases from ∼10 keV at the center to about zero at ∼0.35r ₂₀₀ and is consistent with zero outside ∼0.35r ₂₀₀, implying an upper limit of the feedback efficiency of ∼0.02 for the supermassive black holes hosted in the brightest cluster galaxies.