The Morphologies and Alignments of Gas, Mass, and the Central Galaxies
  of CLASH Clusters of Galaxies
  Morphology is often used to infer the state of relaxation of galaxy clusters.
The regularity, symmetry, and degree to which a cluster is centrally
concentrated inform quantitative measures of cluster morphology. The Cluster
Lensing and Supernova survey with Hubble Space Telescope (CLASH) used weak and
strong lensing to measure the distribution of matter within a sample of 25
clusters, 20 of which were deemed to be relaxed based on their X-ray morphology
and alignment of the X-ray emission with the BCG. Towards a quantitative
characterization of this important sample of clusters, we present uniformly
estimated X-ray morphological statistics for all 25 CLASH clusters. We compare
X-ray morphologies of CLASH clusters with those identically measured for a
large sample of simulated clusters from the MUSIC-2 simulations, selected by
mass. We confirm a threshold in X-ray surface brightness concentration of C>0.4
for cool-core clusters, where C is the ratio of X-ray emission inside 100
kpc/h70 compared to inside 500 kpc/h70. We report and compare morphologies of
these clusters inferred from Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect (SZE) maps of the hot gas
and in from projected mass maps based on strong and weak lensing. We find a
strong agreement in alignments of the orientation of major axes for the
lensing, X-ray, and SZE maps of nearly all of the CLASH clusters at radii of
500 kpc (approximately 0.5R500 for these clusters). We also find a striking
alignment of clusters shapes at the 500 kpc scale, as measured with X-ray, SZE,
and lensing, with that of the near-infrared stellar light at 10 kpc scales for
the 20 "relaxed" clusters. This strong alignment indicates a powerful coupling
between the cluster- and galaxy-scale galaxy formation processes.
