Gas clumping factor 2026-10-14
The gas clumping factor measures unresolved inhomogeneity in electron number density within a chosen averaging region. Nonnegative variance gives . At a uniform temperature, thermal bremsstrahlung scales with , whereas the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect scales with . A homogeneous cluster distance from Sunyaev-Zeldovich and X-ray signals inference then gives , for the same geometry and temperature. Correlated temperature variations require additional weighted averages.
There is a genuine flux typo in the original PDF. A received bolometric radiative flux must have inverse-square luminosity distance, so the physically consistent thermal bremsstrahlung expression is . The printed single power of cannot imply the requested Hubble constant scaling.
For an approximately uniform, spherical galaxy cluster let its depth be , where is a fixed geometrical factor. With fixed profile coefficients , the Rayleigh-Jeans law limit of the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect and the bolometric X-ray radiative flux give
Eliminate the electron number density and use :
The cluster distance from Sunyaev-Zeldovich and X-ray signals is consequently
At low cosmological redshift, , so
when the other observables and profile parameters are held fixed. With the PDF's literal instead, , independent of distance: this explicitly shows why the correction is necessary.
Real galaxy clusters are neither uniform nor generally spherical. The inferred depth depends on the ratio of line of sight depth to transverse extent; elongation and orientation selection therefore bias the distance. density clumps enhance X-ray emission, which weights , more than the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, which weights . An unmodelled gas clumping factor greater than one makes the inferred distance too small and the inferred Hubble constant too large in this simple model. Temperature gradients and multiple thermal components bias the X-ray spectral temperature relative to the pressure-weighted Compton y parameter. Metals alter the cooling spectrum, and finite X-ray bands require a spectral and redshift correction to the bolometric approximation. Relativistic thermal corrections, the kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, radio sources and primary Cosmic microwave background anisotropy contaminate the signal. Finally, calibration, angular-profile fitting and low-redshift peculiar velocities affect the observables and the relation between measured redshift and expansion distance.