How far do hot X-ray halos extend around Milky Way-mass galaxies?
In plain words
Galaxies like ours should be wrapped in gas at a million degrees, which glows faintly in X-rays. Its density profile and how far out it reaches are only beginning to be measured.
Precise statement
Determine the electron density profile $n_{e}(r)$ and temperature of X-ray emitting gas ($T \sim 10^{6}\,\mathrm{K}$) around galaxies with $M_{*} \sim 3 \times 10^{10}\text{ to }10^{11}\,M_{\mathrm{sun}}$ out to the virial radius (about 250 kpc), including the slope (for example a beta-model with $\beta \sim 0.5$) and the total hot gas mass.
What would settle it
Stacked deep X-ray surface brightness profiles with resolved temperature and metallicity, combined with thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich profiles for the same galaxies.
Status in the literature
Unverified note: it names recent work and was partly written without a live literature search; it awaits a check by an editor.
eROSITA All-Sky Survey stacking detected extended hot gas around Milky Way-mass galaxies (Zhang et al., A&A, 2024), with the total mass and its dependence on contamination by satellites and point sources debated.
Parent problems
- Special case of Where are the missing baryons of Milky Way-mass galaxies? · open · from revision 1 The parent was revised since revision 1: it now states another question.
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