Chandra Archival Survey of Galaxy Clusters: Surface Photometry of Diffuse X-ray Emission

We have studied the physical properties of X-ray point sources in galaxy clusters for years based on the archival observations using the most sophisticated space X-ray observatory, Chandra X-ray Observatory. Because the ultimate goal of the study is comparing the physical properties of X-ray point sources found in galaxy clusters to those in X-ray blank fields; blank fields are the regions in the sky where any noticeable cosmic diffuse X-ray emission is not observed, an important key issue regarding this study is picking out the point sources related with galaxy clusters. However we do not have red-shift information of all the X-ray point sources. Therefore as a first order approximation we will consider the point sources with smaller projected cluster-centric distance than the adopted size of galaxy clusters. As a first step of this study we perform X-ray surface photometry of ~600 galaxy clusters based on ~800 Chandra ACIS observations. We carefully investigate the radial structures of diffuse X-ray emission in 3 different energy bands. Based on the highly accurate surface photometry we determine the characteristic size of diffuse X-ray emission (i.e., the boundary of X-ray emission). We also investigate the cosmological evolution of this characteristic size of galaxy clusters. General discussion regarding the two dimensional morphology of galaxy clusters will be presented.