Unifying X-ray scaling relations from galaxies to clusters

Abstract

We examine a sample of $\sim 250 000$ "locally brightest galaxies" selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to be central galaxies within their dark matter halos. These were previously stacked by the Planck Collaboration to measure the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich signal as a function of central galaxy stellar mass. Here, we stack the X-ray emission from these halos using data from the ROSAT All-Sky Survey. We detect emission across almost our entire sample, including emission which we attribute to hot gas around galaxies spanning a range of 1.2 dex in stellar mass (corresponding to nearly two orders of magnitude in halo mass) down to $M* = 10^{10.8} M_{\odot}$ ($M_{500} \approx 10^{12.6} M_{\odot}$). Over this range, the X-ray luminosity can be fit by a power-law, either of stellar mass or of halo mass. A single unified scaling relation between mass and $L_X$ applies for galaxies, groups, and clusters. This relation has a steeper slope than expected for self-similarity, in contrast to the $Y_{SZ}$-$M_{500}$ relation, showing the importance of non-gravitational heating. If this heating is predominantly due to AGN feedback, the lack of a break in our relation suggests that AGN feedback is tightly self-regulated and fairly gentle, in agreement with recent high-resolution simulations. Our results are consistent with earlier measurements of the $L_X$-$L_K$ relation for elliptical galaxies and of the $L_X$-$M_{500}$ relation for optically-selected galaxy clusters. However, our $L_X$-$M_{500}$ relation lies more than a factor of two below most previous relations based on X-ray-selected cluster samples. We argue that optical selection offers a less biased view of the $L_X$-$M_{500}$ relation.