The temperature and metallicity distributions of the ICM: insights with TNG-Cluster for XRISM-like observations

Abstract

The new era of high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy will significantly improve our understanding of the intra-cluster medium (ICM) by providing precise constraints on its underlying physical properties. However, spectral fitting requires reasonable assumptions on the thermal and chemical distributions of the gas. We use the output of TNG-Cluster, the newest addition to the IllustrisTNG suite of cosmological magnetohydrodynamical simulations, to provide theoretical expectations for the multi-phase nature of the ICM across hundreds of z=0 clusters (M$_{500c}$ = 10$^{14.0-15.3}$ M$_\odot$) based upon a realistic model for galaxy formation and evolution. We create and analyse, in an observer-like manner, end-to-end XRISM/Resolve mock observations towards cluster centres. We then systematically compare the intrinsic properties of the simulated gas with the inferred ones from spectral fitting via a variety of commonly used spectral-emission models. Our analysis suggests that models with a distribution of temperatures, such as bvlognorm and bvgadem, better describe the complex thermal structure of the ICM, as predicted by TNG-Cluster, but incur biases of 0.5-2 keV (16th-84th percentiles). The 1T bvapec is too simplistic for the predicted broad temperature distributions, while a 2T double bvapec model systematically fails to capture the input temperature structure. However, all spectral emission models systematically underestimate the Fe abundance of the central ICM by ~0.1 Solar (~ 20 per cent) primarily due to projection effects. Selecting only strong cool core clusters leads to minor improvements on inference quality, removing the majority of outliers but maintaining similar overall biases and cluster-to-cluster scatter.