2001A&A...375L..14M

We revisit the XMM-Newton observation of M 87 to make a new and more detailed measurement of the metal abundance profile. After having verified that spectral fits with single temperature models show a dramatic abundance drop within 1 arcmin of the cluster core, we show that more appropriate models, which include a multi-temperature component to account for the strong temperature gradient observed in M 87, and a power-law component to account for the emission of the nucleus and knot A, give a substantially flat abundance profile. The drastic abundance decrement found by fitting a single temperature component to the data is an artifact known as ``Fe-bias'' (Buote 2000MNRAS.311..176B, 2000ApJ...539..172B) following from the application of an oversimplified spectral model to the data.