20–27 Mar 2026
Wild View Resorts
Africa/Gaborone timezone

From Simba-C to Athena: Mock X-ray Elemental Abundances in Galaxy Groups and Clusters

26 Mar 2026, 11:30
15m
Wild View Resorts

Wild View Resorts

Plot 80 President Avenue, Kasane, Botswana
In-person - Talk 6 Galaxy Clusters Science & Engineering

Speaker

Renier Hough (North-West University, South Africa)

Description

Galaxy groups and clusters retain a fossil record of their formation history in the chemical composition of their hot intragroup and intracluster gas. Upcoming high-resolution X-ray missions, such as Athena’s X-IFU, will provide spatially resolved abundance measurements for multiple elements. In this work, I combine the cosmological hydrodynamical simulation Simba-C, which incorporates the Chem5 chemical-enrichment model, with an updated mock X-ray pipeline to predict Athena-like elemental abundances for galaxy groups and clusters.

Using the MOXHA framework, I generate synthetic Athena X-IFU observations for 150 Simba-C haloes spanning the entire group–cluster mass range. We analyse the resulting spectra with Bayesian spectral fitting using BXA+XSPEC, modelling the hot gas as an optically thin thermal plasma. This yields “observed” X-ray temperatures and elemental abundances (O, Ne, Mg, Si, S, Ar, Fe, Ni) with full posterior uncertainties, directly comparable to present and future X-ray surveys. I will present the methodology and first results on global abundance ratios and their trends with halo mass and redshift in Simba-C.

Stream Science or Engineering

Primary author

Renier Hough (North-West University, South Africa)

Co-authors

Prof. Arif Babul (University of Victoria) Mr Aviv Padawer-Blatt (University of Victoria) Dr Fred Jennings (Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia) Prof. Ilani Loubser (North-West University, South Africa) Prof. Romeel Dave (University of Edinburgh)

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.