Gas clumping in galaxy clusters

The reconstruction of galaxy cluster's gas density profiles is usually performed by assuming spherical symmetry and averaging the observed X-ray emission in circular annuli. In the case of a very inhomogeneous and asymmetric gas distribution, this method has been shown to return biased results in numerical simulations because of the n² dependence of the X-ray emissivity. We propose a method to recover the true density profiles in the presence of inhomogeneities, based on the derivation of the azimuthal median of the surface brightness in concentric annuli. We demonstrate the performance of this method with numerical simulations, and apply it to a sample of 31 galaxy clusters in the redshift range 0.04-0.2 observed with ROSAT/Position Sensitive Proportional Counter (PSPC). The clumping factors recovered by comparing the mean and the median are mild and show a slight trend of increasing bias with radius. For R < R₅₀₀, we measure a clumping factor √{C}<1.1, which indicates that the thermodynamic properties and hydrostatic masses measured in this radial range are only mildly affected by this effect. Comparing our results with three sets of hydrodynamical numerical simulations, we found that non-radiative simulations significantly overestimate the level of inhomogeneities in the intracluster medium, while the runs including cooling, star formation, and AGN feedback reproduce the observed trends closely. Our results indicate that most of the accretion of X-ray-emitting gas is taking place in the diffuse, large-scale accretion patterns rather than in compact structures.