Abstract The truncated isothermal sphere (TIS) model has been recently suggested as an alternative for virialized dark halos (Shapiro et al. 1999). Both its profound theoretical motivation and its successful explanations for the galactic rotation curves and the gravitational scaling laws of clusters indicate that the TIS model is a promising candidate among other prevailing models such as the NFW profile and the Burkert profile. This promotes us to re-examine the universality of the TIS model on cluster scales from a different angle. Using an ensemble of X-ray surface brightness profiles of 45 clusters, we test the goodness of fit of the TIS predicted gas distributions to the X-ray data under the assumption of isothermal, hydrostatic equilibrium. Unlike the conventional β model or the NFW/Burkert profile, for which about half of the clusters have the reduced χ2νvalues smaller than 2, ν the TIS model fails in the fitting of the X-ray surface brightness profiles of clusters in the sense that 38 out of the 45 clusters show χ2ν > 2. This may constitute a challenge for the universality of the TIS model unless the present analysis is seriously contaminated by other uncertainties including the negligence of non-gravitational heating processes and the unconventional sampling of the X-ray data.

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