Paper detail

Do X-ray dark or underluminous galaxy clusters exist?

[Abridged] We study the X-ray properties of a color-selected sample of clusters at 0.1<z<0.3, to quantify the real aboundance of the population of X-ray dark or underluminous clusters and at the same time the spurious detection contamination level of color-selected cluster catalogs. A careful selection allowed us to have an X-ray-unbiased sample of 33 clusters to measure the Lx-richness relation. Swift 1.4 Ms X-ray observations show that at least 89% of the color-detected clusters are real objects with a potential well deep enough to heat and retain an intracluster medium. The percentage rises to 94 % when one includes the single spectroscopically confirmed color-selected cluster whose X-ray emission is not secured. Looking at our results from the opposite perspective, the percentage of X-ray dark clusters among color-selected clusters is very low: at most about 11 per cent (at 90 % confidence). Supplementing our data with those from literature, we conclude that X-ray- and color- cluster surveys sample the same population and consequently that in this regard we can safely use clusters selected with any of the two methods for cosmological purposes. This is an essential and promising piece of information for upcoming surveys in both the optical/IR (DES, EUCLID) and X-ray (eRosita). Richness correlates with X-ray luminosity with a large scatter, 0.51+/-0.08 (0.44+/-0.07) dex in lgLx at a given richness, when Lx is measured in a 500 (1070) kpc aperture. We release data and software to estimate the X-ray flux, or its upper limit, of a source with over-Poisson background fluctuations (found in this work to be ~20% on cluster angular scales) and to fit X-ray luminosity vs richness if there is an intrinsic scatter. These Bayesian applications rigorously account for boundaries (e.g. the X-ray luminosity and the richness cannot be negative).