X-ray cluster temperature profiles

Context. A study of the structural and scaling properties of the temperature distribution of the hot, X-ray emitting intra-cluster medium of galaxy clusters, and its dependence on dynamical state, can give insights into the physical processes governing the formation and evolution of structure. Aims. Accurate temperature measurements are a pre-requisite for a precise knowledge of the thermodynamic properties of the intra-cluster medium. Methods. We analyse the X-ray temperature profiles from XMM-Newton observations of 15 nearby (z < 0.2) clusters, drawn from a statistically representative sample. The clusters cover a temperature range from 2.5 keV to 8.5 keV, and present a variety of X-ray morphologies. We derive accurate projected temperature profiles to ∼ 0.5 R200, and compare structural properties (outer slope, presence of cooling core) with a quantitative measure of the X-ray morphology as expressed by power ratios. We also compare the results to recent cosmological numerical