GALAXY CLUSTERS DISCOVERED WITH A SUNYAEV–ZEL'DOVICH EFFECT SURVEY

By Z. Staniszewski, P. Ade, K. Aird, B. Benson, L. Bleem, J. Carlstrom, C. Chang, Hsiao-mei Cho, T. Crawford, A. Crites and 34 more. 2008

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The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is conducting a Sunyaev–Zel'dovich (SZ) effect survey over large areas of the southern sky, searching for massive galaxy clusters to high redshift. In this preliminary study, we focus on a 40 deg2 area targeted by the Blanco Cosmology Survey (BCS), which is centered roughly at right ascension 5h30m, declination −53° (J2000). Over two seasons of observations, this entire region has been mapped by the SPT at 95 GHz, 150 GHz, and 225 GHz. We report the four most significant SPT detections of SZ clusters in this field, three of which were previously unknown and, therefore, represent the first galaxy clusters discovered with an SZ survey. The SZ clusters are detected as decrements with greater than 5σ significance in the high-sensitivity 150 GHz SPT map. The SZ spectrum of these sources is confirmed by detections of decrements at the corresponding locations in the 95 GHz SPT map and nondetections at those locations in the 225 GHz SPT map. Multiband optical images from the BCS survey demonstrate significant concentrations of similarly colored galaxies at the positions of the SZ detections. Photometric redshift estimates from the BCS data indicate that two of the clusters lie at moderate redshift (z ∼ 0.4) and two at high redshift (z ≳ 0.8). One of the SZ detections was previously identified as a galaxy cluster in the optical as part of the Abell supplementary southern cluster catalog and in the X-ray using data from the ROSAT All-Sky Survey (RASS). Potential RASS counterparts (not previously identified as clusters) are also found for two of the new discoveries. These first four galaxy clusters are the most significant SZ detections from a subset of the ongoing SPT survey. As such, they serve as a demonstration that SZ surveys, and the SPT in particular, can be an effective means for finding galaxy clusters.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fcdb18568fa4c1dc547a98180c48cc66d7636d73

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Citations in the corpus

COSMOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS FROM SUNYAEV–ZEL'DOVICH-SELECTED CLUSTERS WITH X-RAY OBSERVATIONS IN THE FIRST 178 deg2 OF THE SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE SURVEY (2011, background): “Recently, the first SZ cluster catalogs from three surveys have been released: the South Pole Telescope (SPT; Staniszewski et al. 2009; Vanderlinde et al. 2010; Williamson et al. 2011), the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (Marriage et al. 2011), and the Planck satellite (Planck Collaboration et al.…”
GALAXY CLUSTERS DISCOVERED VIA THE SUNYAEV–ZEL’DOVICH EFFECT IN THE FIRST 720 SQUARE DEGREES OF THE SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE SURVEY (2012, methodology): “The 2009 data in this work are calibrated using observations of RCW38, a galactic HII region (Staniszewski et al. 2009, W11), while the 2008 data are calibrated by cross-correlating dedicated SPT observations of large patches of sky with WMAP observations of those same regions (V10).”
GALAXY CLUSTERS SELECTED WITH THE SUNYAEV–ZEL'DOVICH EFFECT FROM 2008 SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE OBSERVATIONS (2010, background): “However, it was not until very recently that the first previously unknown clusters were identified through their thermal SZ effect (Staniszewski et al. 2009).”
A MEASUREMENT OF GRAVITATIONAL LENSING OF THE MICROWAVE BACKGROUND USING SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE DATA (2012, background): “…sample of galaxy clusters for cosmological studies, e.g., for measuring the growth of structure to constrain the dark energy equation of state (Staniszewski et al. 2009; Vanderlinde et al. 2010; Foley et al. 2011; Williamson et al. 2011) and to measure the power spectrum of the mm-wave sky…”
EXTRAGALACTIC MILLIMETER-WAVE SOURCES IN SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE SURVEY DATA: SOURCE COUNTS, CATALOG, AND STATISTICS FOR AN 87 SQUARE-DEGREE FIELD (2009, background): “This survey is 763 currently underway and the SPT team recently published the first-ever discovery of galaxy clusters through their SZ signature (Staniszewski et al. 2009, hereafter S09).”
SEVEN-YEAR WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE (WMAP) OBSERVATIONS: COSMOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION (2010, background): “New measurements of the SZ effect toward many individual clusters with unprecedented sensitivity are now becoming available (Staniszewski et al. 2009; Hincks et al. 2009; Plagge et al. 2010).”
LSST: From Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products (2008, background): “In addition, LSST will identify optical counterparts and provide deep optical imaging for clusters detected in other wavebands (e.g., Staniszewski et al. 2009).”
THE ATACAMA COSMOLOGY TELESCOPE: SUNYAEV–ZEL'DOVICH-SELECTED GALAXY CLUSTERS AT 148 GHz IN THE 2008 SURVEY (2010, methodology): “The first blind detections of galaxy clusters through their Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect were reported by Staniszewski et al. (2009) for the South Pole Telescope (SPT; Carlstrom et al. 2009).”
THE BLANCO COSMOLOGY SURVEY: DATA ACQUISITION, PROCESSING, CALIBRATION, QUALITY DIAGNOSTICS, AND DATA RELEASE (2012, methodology): “These clusters and their BCS derived redshifts have figured prominently in SPT publications to date (Staniszewski et al. 2009; Vanderlinde et al. 2010; High et al. 2010; Andersson et al. 2011; Williamson et al. 2011; Reichardt et al. 2012; Song et al. 2012).”
X-RAY PROPERTIES OF THE FIRST SUNYAEV–ZEL'DOVICH EFFECT SELECTED GALAXY CLUSTER SAMPLE FROM THE SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE (2010, methodology): “The data from the first of these fields was used to report the first SZ-discovered clusters (Staniszewski et al. 2009), to measure source counts of extragalactic mm-wavelength emitting objects (Vieira et al. 2009), and to measure small scale temperature anisotropies due to the SZ effect from…”
Radio and millimeter continuum surveys and their astrophysical implications (2009, background): “…the hot gas responsible for the X-ray emission of rich clusters of galaxies has been detected with high signal-to-noise and even imaged in many tens of objects (Carlstrom et al. 2002; Benson et al. 2004; Jones et al. 2005; Bonamente et al. 2006; Halverson et al. 2009; Staniszewski et al. 2009).”
GALAXY CLUSTERS DISCOVERED VIA THE SUNYAEV–ZEL'DOVICH EFFECT IN THE 2500-SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2014, methodology): “Previous SPT publications first identified SPT-CL J0509−5342, SPT-CL J0546−5345 (Staniszewski et al. 2009), SPT-CL J0540−5744, SPT-CL J2331−5051 (High et al. 2010), SPT-CL J2011−5228, and SPT-CL J2011−5725 (Song et al. 2012) as strong-lensing clusters using optical imaging data.”