GALAXY CLUSTERS DISCOVERED VIA THE SUNYAEV–ZEL’DOVICH EFFECT IN THE FIRST 720 SQUARE DEGREES OF THE SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE SURVEY

By C. Reichardt, B. Stalder, L. Bleem, T. Montroy, K. Aird, K. Andersson, R. Armstrong, M. Ashby, M. Bautz, M. Bayliss and 70 more. 2012

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We present a catalog of galaxy cluster candidates, selected through their Sunyaev–Zel'dovich (SZ) effect signature in the first 720 deg2 of the South Pole Telescope (SPT) survey. This area was mapped with the SPT in the 2008 and 2009 austral winters to a depth of ∼18 μKCMB-arcmin at 150 GHz; 550 deg2 of it was also mapped to ∼44 μKCMB-arcmin at 95 GHz. Based on optical imaging of all 224 candidates and near-infrared imaging of the majority of candidates, we have found optical and/or infrared counterparts for 158, which we then classify as confirmed galaxy clusters. Of these 158 clusters, 135 were first identified as clusters in SPT data, including 117 new discoveries reported in this work. This catalog triples the number of confirmed galaxy clusters discovered through the SZ effect. We report photometrically derived (and in some cases spectroscopic) redshifts for confirmed clusters and redshift lower limits for the remaining candidates. The catalog extends to high redshift with a median redshift of z = 0.55 and maximum confirmed redshift of z = 1.37. Forty-five of the clusters have counterparts in the ROSAT bright or faint source catalogs from which we estimate X-ray fluxes. Based on simulations, we expect the catalog to be nearly 100% complete above M500 ≈ 5 × 1014 M☉ h−170 at z ≳ 0.6. There are 121 candidates detected at signal-to-noise ratio greater than five, at which the catalog purity is measured to be 95%. From this high-purity subsample, we exclude the z < 0.3 clusters and use the remaining 100 candidates to improve cosmological constraints following the method presented by Benson et al. Adding the cluster data to CMB + BAO + H0 data leads to a preference for non-zero neutrino masses while only slightly reducing the upper limit on the sum of neutrino masses to ∑mν < 0.38 eV (95% CL). For a spatially flat wCDM cosmological model, the addition of this catalog to the CMB + BAO + H0 + SNe results yields σ8 = 0.807 ± 0.027 and w = −1.010 ± 0.058, improving the constraints on these parameters by a factor of 1.4 and 1.3, respectively. The larger cluster catalog presented in this work leads to slight improvements in cosmological constraints from those presented by Benson et al. These cosmological constraints are currently limited by uncertainty in the cluster mass calibration, not the size or quality of the cluster catalog. A multi-wavelength observation program to improve the cluster mass calibration will make it possible to realize the full potential of the final 2500 deg2 SPT cluster catalog to constrain cosmology.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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Citations in the corpus

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Catalog of >4000 Sunyaev–Zel’dovich Galaxy Clusters (2020, background): “…the development of “blind” SZ surveys that constrain cosmological parameters by measuring the evolution of the cluster mass function (e.g., Vanderlinde et al. 2010; Sehgal et al. 2011; Hasselfield et al. 2013; Reichardt et al. 2013; Planck Collaboration et al. 2014a, 2016a; Bocquet et al. 2019).”
CONSTRAINTS ON COSMOLOGY FROM THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND POWER SPECTRUM OF THE 2500 deg2 SPT-SZ SURVEY (2012, methodology): “11 In this section, we include low-redshift measurements of the BAO feature, H0, the halo power spectrum derived from SDSS luminous red galaxies (LRGs) from Reid et al. (2010), and the cluster abundances from the SPT SZ-selected cluster catalog (SPTCL) described by Reichardt et al. (2013).”
Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, background): “Constraints from SZ selected samples are emerging (Vanderlinde et al., 2010; Sehgal et al., 2011; Reichardt et al., 2013), and while they are currently weak because of the relatively large uncertainty in the SZ-mass scaling relation, the extensive follow-up campaigns that are currently underway…”
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Sunyaev-Zel'dovich selected galaxy clusters at 148 GHz from three seasons of data (2013, methodology): “Recognizing that the cluster angular scale is poorly constrained by the filter ensemble, recent work from the South Pole Telescope has included a marginalization over the results returned by the ensemble of filters (e.g., Story et al. 2011; Reichardt et al. 2013).”
The Canadian Cluster Comparison Project: detailed study of systematics and updated weak lensing masses (2015, methodology): “In fact, the lack of calibrated scaling relations is currently the dominant limitation of blind searches that exploit this effect, such as those carried out using the South Pole Telescope (Reichardt et al. 2013) or the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (Hasselfield et al. 2013).”
Planck 2013 results. XX. Cosmology from Sunyaev-Zeldovich cluster counts (2013, background): “Subsequently, Reichardt et al. (2013) reported a much larger cluster sample and used this to improve on the statistical uncertainties on the cosmological parameters (see Table 3).”
SPTpol: an instrument for CMB polarization measurements with the South Pole Telescope (2012, unknown): “As demonstrated by SPT-SZ, a high-resolution SZ cluster survey can uniquely find the most massive clusters in the Universe nearly independently of redshift.(5) Relative to SPT-SZ, SPTpol will have a factor of ∼1.”
A MEASUREMENT OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND DAMPING TAIL FROM THE 2500-SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2012, methodology): “Optical and SZ-based surveys give comparable and 13 14 consistent constraints, for example, Rozo et al. (2010) and Reichardt et al. (2013).”
Weighing the giants – IV. Cosmology and neutrino mass (2014, background): “The analysis of Vikhlinin et al. (2009) employs a combination of low-redshift RASS clusters and clusters at 0.35 < z < 0.9 from the 400 square degree ROSAT catalog (Burenin et al. 2007).”
The pre-launch Planck Sky Model: a model of sky emission at submillimetre to centimetre wavelengths (2012, background): “Those observations aim both at studying previously known clusters (Basu et al. 2010; Zwart et al. 2011; Hincks et al. 2010) and at discovering new objects blindly (Vanderlinde et al. 2010; Williamson et al. 2011; Planck Collaboration 2011c; Marriage et al. 2011a; Reichardt et al. 2013).”