Speaker
Description
Upcoming cosmological surveys aim to measure the matter power spectrum with percent-level precision, but baryonic effects, in particularly AGN feedback, remain a major source of systematic uncertainty, suppressing power on small scales. Constraining how feedback redistributes gas in dark matter haloes is therefore essential for robust cosmological inference.
Galaxy groups, with their shallow potentials, are especially sensitive to feedback and provide a powerful testbed. We compare thermodynamic properties of galaxy groups from the X-GAP sample with the FLAMINGO simulation suite using a fully forward-modelled approach that accounts for selection effects and X-ray measurement systematics.
We find that intermediate feedback models best reproduce the observed scaling relations, while both weaker and more extreme scenarios are disfavoured. This tension with other probes highlights the current uncertainty in baryonic physics and its direct impact on matter power spectrum suppression.