Spherical bias on the 3D reconstruction of the ICM density profile in galaxy clusters

X-ray observations of galaxy clusters are routinely used to derive radial distributions of ICM thermdynamical properties such as density and temperature. However, observations allow us to access quantities projected on the celestial sphere only, so that an assumption on the 3D distribution of the ICM is necessary. Usually, spherical geometry is assumed. The aim of this paper is to determine the bias due to this approximation on the reconstruction of ICM density radial profile of a clusters sample and on the intrinsic scatter of the density profiles distribution, when clusters substructures are not masked. We used 98 simulated clusters for which we know the 3D ICM distribution drawn from The Three Hundred project. For each cluster we simulated 40 different observations by projecting the cluster along 40 different lines of sight. We extracted the ICM density profile from each observation assuming the ICM to be spherical distributed. For each line of sight we then considered the mean density profile over the sample and compared it with the 3D density profile given by the simulations. The spherical bias on the density profile is derived by considering the ratio between the observed and the input quantities. We also study the bias on the intrinsic scatter of the density profile distribution performing the same procedure. We find a bias on the density profile, $b_n$, smaller than $10\%$ for $R\lesssim R_{500}$ while it increases up to $\sim 50\%$ for larger radii. The bias on the intrinsic scatter profile, $b_s$, reaches a value of $\approx 100\%$ for $R\approx R_{500}$. The bias on both the analysed quantities strongly depends on the morphology of the objects: for clusters that do not show large scale substructures, both $b_n$ and $b_s$ are reduced by a factor 2, conversely for systems that do show large scale substructures both $b_n$ and $b_s$ increase significantly. [abridged]
Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A