Speaker
Description
Galaxy groups and clusters are some of the most massive gravitationally bound structures in the Universe. Located at the nodes of the cosmic web, these systems are laboratories for analysing theories of both galaxy evolution and cosmology. In such models, groups and clusters provide an excellent tool for constraining cosmological parameters through their mass functions. However, this approach is challenged by the models’ dependency on the dynamical state of these systems. Namely, to accurately estimate the mass profiles of groups and clusters, they are expected to be dynamically relaxed. Relaxation, however, fluctuates during evolution, and determining it is not well-defined observationally. One way to address this issue is to examine the brightest group and cluster galaxies (BCGs/BGGs) to infer the dynamical state of their host systems. Since BCGs and BGGs are closely linked to their hosts due to their unique formation histories, it is reasonable to expect correlations between BCG/BGG properties and relaxation. In my talk, I will present some observable proxies that have shown promising results for the dynamical state estimation in cosmological hydrodynamical simulations and discuss how these results can be applied to future observational surveys.