Effects of anisotropy on gravitational infall in galaxy clusters using an exact general relativistic model

Abstract

We study the effects and implications of anisotropies at the scale of galaxy clusters by building an exact general relativistic model of a cluster using the inhomogeneous and anisotropic Szekeres metric. The model is built from a modified Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) density profile. We compare this to a corresponding spherically symmetric structure in the Lemaȋtre-Tolman (LT) model and quantify the impact of introducing varying levels of anisotropy. We examine two physical measures of gravitational infall — the growth rate of density and the velocity of the source dust in the model. We introduce a generalization of the LT dust velocity profile for the Szekeres metric and demonstrate its consistency with the growth rate of density. We find that the growth rate of density in one substructure increases by 0.5%, 1.5%, and 3.75% for 5%, 10%, and 15% levels of introduced anisotropy, which is measured as the fractional displaced mass relative to the spherically symmetric case. The infall velocity of the dust is found to increase by 2.5, 10, and 20 km s−1 (0.5%, 2%, and 4.5%), respectively, for the same three levels of anisotropy. This response to the anisotropy in a structure is found to be strongly nonlinear with respect to the strength of anisotropy. These relative velocities correspond to an equivalent increase in the total mass of the spherically symmetric structure of 1%, 3.8%, and 8.4%, indicating that not accounting for the presence of anisotropic mass distributions in cluster models can strongly bias the determination of physical properties like the total mass.