| Towards the 2020 vision of the baryon content of galaxy groups and clusters (2009) | |||||||||
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| Groups and clusters of galaxies occupy a special position in the hierarchy of large-scale cosmic structures because they are the largest and the most massive (from ~10^13 Msun to over 10^15 Msun) objects in the universe that have had time to undergo gravitational collapse. The large masses of clusters imply that their contents have been accreted from regions of ~8-40 comoving Mpc in size and should thus be representative of the mean matter content of the universe. During the next decade sensitive multi-wavelength observations should be able to map the radial distributions of all main mass components (stars, cold, warm, and hot gas and total mass) at z. Comment: 9 pages, Science white paper for the Astro2010 Decadal Survey with extended ref. list, 2 Figures | |||||||||
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