Regulation of the X-ray luminosity of clusters of galaxies by cooling and supernova feedback

Clusters of galaxies are thought to contain about ten times as much dark matter as baryonic matter1. The dark component therefore dominates the gravitational potential of a cluster, and the baryons confined by this potential radiate X-rays with a luminosity that depends mainly on the gas density in the cluster's core2. Predictions of the X-rays' properties based on models of cluster formation do not, however, agree with the observations. If the models ignore the condensation of cooling gas into stars and feedback from the associated supernovae, they overestimate the X-ray luminosity because the density of the core gas is too high. An early episode of uniformly distributed supernova feedback could rectify this by heating the uncondensed gas and therefore making it harder to compress into the core3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11, but such a process seems to require an implausibly large number of supernovae6,8,12,13,14. Here we show how radiative cooling of intergalactic gas and subsequent supernova heating conspire to eliminate highly compressible low-entropy gas from the intracluster medium. This brings the core entropy and X-ray luminosities of clusters into agreement with the observations, in a way that depends little on the efficiency of supernova heating in the early Universe.