Kavli Affiliate: Mark Vogelsberger
| First 5 Authors: François Mernier, Yuanyuan Su, Maxim Markevitch, Congyao Zhang, Aurora Simionescu
| Summary:
Synthesized in the cores of stars and supernovae, most metals disperse over
cosmic scales and are ultimately deposited well outside the gravitational
potential of their host galaxies. Since their presence is well visible through
their X-ray emission lines in the hot gas pervading galaxy clusters, measuring
metal abundances in the intracluster medium (ICM) offers us a unique view of
chemical enrichment of the Universe as a whole. Despite extraordinary progress
in the field thanks to four decades of X-ray spectroscopy using CCD (and
gratings) instruments, understanding the precise stellar origins of the bulk of
metals, and when the latter were mixed on Mpc scales, requires an X-ray mission
capable of spatial, non-dispersive high resolution spectroscopy covering at
least the soft X-ray band over a large field of view. In this White Paper, we
demonstrate how the Line Emission Mapper (LEM) probe mission concept will
revolutionize our current picture of the ICM enrichment. Specifically, we show
that LEM will be able to (i) spatially map the distribution of ten key chemical
elements out to the virial radius of a nearby relaxed cluster and (ii) measure
metal abundances in serendipitously discovered high-redshift protoclusters.
Altogether, these key observables will allow us to constrain the chemical
history of the largest gravitationally bound structures of the Universe. They
will also solve key questions such as the universality of the initial mass
function (IMF) and the initial metallicity of the stellar populations producing
these metals, as well as the relative contribution of asymptotic giant branch
(AGB) stars, core-collapse, and Type Ia supernovae to enrich the cosmic web
over Mpc scales. Concrete observing strategies are also briefly discussed.
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