Cosmology and astrophysics from relaxed galaxy clusters - II. Cosmological constraints

By A. Mantz, S. Allen, R. Morris, David Rapetti, D. Applegate, P. Kelly, A. V. D. Linden, R. W. S. K. Chicago, Kipac StanfordSLAC, D. C. Centre and 3 more. 2014

190 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present cosmological constraints from measurements of the gas mass fraction, $f_{gas}$, for massive, dynamically relaxed galaxy clusters. Our data set consists of Chandra observations of 40 such clusters, identified in a comprehensive search of the Chandra archive, as well as high-quality weak gravitational lensing data for a subset of these clusters. Incorporating a robust gravitational lensing calibration of the X-ray mass estimates, and restricting our measurements to the most self-similar and accurately measured regions of clusters, significantly reduces systematic uncertainties compared to previous work. Our data for the first time constrain the intrinsic scatter in $f_{gas}$, $(7.4\pm2.3)$% in a spherical shell at radii 0.8-1.2 $r_{2500}$, consistent with the expected variation in gas depletion and non-thermal pressure for relaxed clusters. From the lowest-redshift data in our sample we obtain a constraint on a combination of the Hubble parameter and cosmic baryon fraction, $h^{3/2}\Omega_b/\Omega_m=0.089\pm0.012$, that is insensitive to the nature of dark energy. Combined with standard priors on $h$ and $\Omega_b h^2$, this provides a tight constraint on the cosmic matter density, $\Omega_m=0.27\pm0.04$, which is similarly insensitive to dark energy. Using the entire cluster sample, extending to $z>1$, we obtain consistent results for $\Omega_m$ and interesting constraints on dark energy: $\Omega_\Lambda=0.65^{+0.17}_{-0.22}$ for non-flat $\Lambda$CDM models, and $w=-0.98\pm0.26$ for flat constant-$w$ models. Our results are both competitive and consistent with those from recent CMB, SNIa and BAO data. We present constraints on models of evolving dark energy from the combination of $f_{gas}$ data with these external data sets, and comment on the possibilities for improved $f_{gas}$ constraints using current and next-generation X-ray observatories and lensing data. (Abridged)

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b85589f66a54fb1e88748e419efc921422ea6f6

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Citations in the corpus

Weighing the giants – IV. Cosmology and neutrino mass (2014, background): “…we take advantage of the cosmological information available from X-ray measurements of the gas mass fraction, fgas, at ∼ r2500 for relaxed clusters (Mantz et al. 2014, hereafter M14).5 More precisely, these fgas measurements are made in a spherical shell spanning 0.8–1.2 r2500, where…”
The Simons Observatory: science goals and forecasts (2018, background): “…by uncertainties in the observable-to-mass scaling relation (e.g., Vikhlinin et al. 2009; Vanderlinde et al. 2010; Sehgal et al. 2011; Benson et al. 2013; Hasselfield et al. 2013b; Planck Collaboration 2014c; Mantz et al. 2014; Planck Collaboration 2016j; Mantz et al. 2015; de Haan et al. 2016).”
COSMOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS FROM GALAXY CLUSTERS IN THE 2500 SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2016, methodology): “…the ROSAT All-Sky Survey (RASS), follow-up X-ray observations from Chandra, including cosmological constraints from cluster gas-fraction (fgas, see Mantz et al. 2014) measurements, and weak lensing data from WtG; a subset of which we used to estimate our cluster mass calibration in Section 4.2.”
Wide-Field InfrarRed Survey Telescope-Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets WFIRST-AFTA 2015 Report (2015, unknown): “…weak lensing mass calibration of clusters for cosmological constraints has been successfully implemented by Rozo et al. (2010) for optically selected clusters and Mantz et al. (2014) for Xray selected clusters, yielding some of the tightest current constraints on the amplitude of matter clustering.”