ASCA Observations of the Temperature Structure and Metal Distribution in the Perseus Cluster of Galaxies

Large-scale distributions of hot-gas temperature and Fe abundance in the Perseus cluster have been studied with multi-pointing observations by the GIS instrument onboard ASCA. Within a radius of 20 ′ from the cluster center, the energy spectra requires two temperature components, in which the cool component indicates kT ∼ 2 keV and the hot-component temperature shows a significant decline from about 8 keV to 6 keV toward the center. In the outer region of the cluster, the temperature shows a fluctuation with an amplitude of about 2 keV, which suggest that a western region at ∼ 16 ′ from the cluster center is relatively hotter. As for the Fe abundance, a significant decline with radius is detected from 0.44 solar at the center to ∼ 0.1 solar at a 50 ′ offset region. If the observed Fe-K line intensity within 4 ′ from the center is suppressed by a factor of 2 due to the resonance scattering effect, the corrected Fe mass density follows the galaxy distribution. Finally, our results do not support the large-scale velocity gradient