SCALING RELATION IN TWO SITUATIONS OF EXTREME MERGERS

Clusters of galaxies are known to be dynamically active systems, yet X-ray studies of the low-redshift population exhibit tight scaling laws. In this work, we extend previous studies of this apparent paradox using numerical simulations of two extreme merger cases, one is a high Mach number (above 2.5) satellite merger similar to the "bullet cluster" and the other is a merger of nearly equal-mass progenitors. Creating X-ray images densely sampled in time, we construct T-X, M-gas, and Y-X measures within R-500 and compare to the calibrations of Kravtsov et al. We find that these extreme merger cases respect the scaling relations, for both intrinsic measures and for measures derived from appropriately masked, synthetic Chandra X-ray images. The masking procedure plays a critical role in the X-ray temperature calculation, while it is irrelevant in the X-ray gas mass derivation. Miscentering up to 100 kpc does not influence the result. The observationally determined radius R-500 might conduce to systematic shifts in M-gas and Y-X, which increases the total mass scatter.