The SPT-Chandra BCG Spectroscopic Survey I: Evolution of the Entropy Threshold for Cooling and Feedback in Galaxy Clusters Over the Last 10 Gyr ...

• Main Authors: Calzadilla, Michael S., McDonald, Michael, Benson, Bradford A., Bleem, Lindsey E., Croston, Judith H., Donahue, Megan, Edge, Alastair C., Floyd, Benjamin, Garmire, Gordon P., Hlavacek-Larrondo, Julie, Huynh, Minh T., Khullar, Gourav, Kraft, Ralph P., McNamara, Brian R., Noble, Allison G., Romero, Charles E., Ruppin, Florian, Somboonpanyakul, Taweewat, Voit, G. Mark
• Format: Report
• Language: unknown
• Published: arXiv 2023
• Subjects: Astrophysics of Galaxies astro-ph.GA; FOS Physical sciences; South pole
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2311.00396; https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00396

We present a multi-wavelength study of the brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) in a sample of the 95 most massive galaxy clusters selected from South Pole Telescope (SPT) Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) survey. Our sample spans a redshift range of 0.3 < z < 1.7, and is complete with optical spectroscopy from various ground-based observatories, as well as ground and space-based imaging from optical, X-ray and radio wavebands. At z~0, previous studies have shown a strong correlation between the presence of a low-entropy cool core and the presence of star-formation and a radio-loud AGN in the central BCG. We show for the first time that a central entropy threshold for star formation persists out to z~1. The central entropy (measured in this work at a radius of 10 kpc) below which clusters harbor star-forming BCGs is found to be as low as $K_\mathrm{10 ~ kpc} = 35 \pm 4$ keV cm$^2$ at z < 0.15 and as high as $K_\mathrm{10 ~ kpc} = 52 \pm 11$ keV cm$^2$ at z~1. We find only marginal (~1$σ$) evidence for evolution ... : 22 pages. 10 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to ApJ ...