From stars to large-scale structures : chemical enrichment in the intracluster medium

Séminaire IPAG de François Mernier (ESA ESTEC), jeudi 28 janvier 2021, 11h00, IPAG seminar room

Despite being the building blocks of rocky planets and even life, metals mostly reside outside galaxies - i.e. within a hot, ionized, X-ray emitting plasma pervading galaxy clusters and groups, and massive ellipticals. The presence of these metals in such volumes constitutes thus a fossil record of the enrichment of the largest-scale structures of our Universe, and measuring the abundance of their chemical elements (via X-ray spectroscopy) in these systems is the key to understand when, where, and by which physical processes this large-scale enrichment took place. Moreover, the accuracy on specific abundance ratios offered by the most recent generation of X-ray observatories allows us to put constraints on the physics and environment of the (Type Ia and core-collapse) supernovae responsible for the enrichment at cluster scales. Here we will briefly review the most recent achievements in this field (mainly obtained with XMM-Newton, Suzaku, and Hitomi), before showing how high-resolution spectroscopy offered by future missions - in particular Athena - will push our understanding of the cycle of baryons and metals to the next level.