A model for the post-collapse equilibrium of cosmological structure: truncated isothermal spheres from top-hat density perturbations

The postcollapse structure of objects which form by gravitational condensation out of the expanding cosmological background universe is a key element in the theory of galaxy formation. Towards this end, we have reconsidered the outcome of the nonlinear growth of a uniform, spherical density perturbation in an unperturbed background universe - the cosmological ``top-hat'' problem. We adopt the usual assumption that the collapse to infinite density at a finite time predicted by the top-hat solution is interrupted by a rapid virialization caused by the growth of small-scale inhomogeneities in the initial perturbation. We replace the standard description of the postcollapse object as a uniform sphere in virial equilibrium by a more self-consistent one as a truncated, nonsingular, isothermal sphere in virial and hydrostatic equilibrium, including for the first time a proper treatment of the finite-pressure boundary condition on the sphere. The results differ significantly from both the uniform sphere and the singular isothermal sphere approximations for the postcollapse objects. These results will have a significant effect on a wide range of applications of the Press-Schechter and other semi-analytical models to cosmology. The truncated isothermal sphere solution presented here predicts the virial temperature and integrated mass distribution of the X-ray clusters formed in the CDM model as found by detailed, 3D, numerical gas and N-body dynamical simulations remarkably well. This solution allows us to derive analytically the numerically-calibrated mass-temperature and radius-temperature scaling laws for X-ray clusters which were derived empirically by Evrard, Metzler and Navarro from simulation results for the CDM model. (Shortened)