Physical viability of shallow pressure profiles

Determine whether the shallow best-fit thermal-pressure profiles inferred for some circumgalactic and intragroup media are physically viable when their implied thermal energy fails to converge at large radius.

Background

Several mass and richness bins favor generalized Navarro–Frenk–White pressure profiles with outer slopes below the value required for finite total thermal energy at large radius. The authors note that the projected SZ data alone cannot establish whether such profiles are physically realizable. A possible resolution is truncation of the density and/or temperature at a finite radius, potentially associated with a shock, but the origin and thermodynamic character of such a truncation remain unresolved.