Events at Physics |
Because metals produced by intracluster stars do not need to escape from galaxies, but are instead directly injected into the intergalactic medium, the existence of this stellar population also has significant consequences for the enrichment history of the hot, X-ray-emitting, intracluster gas.
I will review our recent work characterizing the properties of
intracluster stars, as well as new constraints on missing baryons on the scales of clusters and groups, on whether it is possible to account for the high metal content of the intracluster medium, and on the mass profiles of the largest bound systems in the universe.