A Simple Physical Model for the Gas Distribution in Galaxy Clusters
  The dominant baryonic component of galaxy clusters is hot gas whose
distribution is commonly probed through X-ray emission arising from thermal
bremsstrahlung. The density profile thus obtained has been traditionally
modeled with a beta-profile, a simple function with only three parameters.
However, this model is known to be insufficient for characterizing the range of
cluster gas distributions, and attempts to rectify this shortcoming typically
introduce additional parameters to increase the fitting flexibility. We use
cosmological and physical considerations to obtain a family of profiles for the
gas with fewer parameters than the beta-model but which better accounts for
observed gas profiles over wide radial intervals.
