Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Combined kinematic and thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich measurements from BOSS CMASS and LOWZ halos

The scattering of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons off the free-electron gas in galaxies and clusters leaves detectable imprints on high resolution CMB maps: the thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects (tSZ and kSZ respectively). We use combined microwave maps from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope DR5 and Planck in combination with the CMASS (mean redshift (z) = 0.55 and host halo mass (M-vir) = 3 x 10(13) M-circle dot) and LOWZ ((z) = 0.31, (M-vir) = 5 x 10(13) M-circle dot) galaxy catalogs from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS DR10 and DR12), to study the gas associated with these galaxy groups. Using individual reconstructed velocities, we perform a stacking analysis and reject the no-kSZ hypothesis at 6.5 sigma, the highest significance to date. This directly translates into a measurement of the electron number density profile, and thus of the gas density profile. Despite the limited signal to noise, the measurement shows at high significance that the gas density profile is more extended than the dark matter density profile, for any reasonable baryon abundance (formally >90 sigma for the cosmic baryon abundance). We simultaneously measure the tSZ signal, i.e., the electron thermal pressure profile of the same CMASS objects, and reject the no-tSZ hypothesis at 10 sigma. We combine tSZ and kSZ measurements to estimate the electron temperature to 20% precision in several aperture bins, and find it comparable to the virial temperature. In a companion paper, we analyze these measurements to constrain the gas thermodynamics and the properties of feedback inside galaxy groups. We present the corresponding LOWZ measurements in this paper, ruling out a null kSZ (tSZ) signal at 2.9 (13.9)sigma, and leave their interpretation to future work. This paper and the companion paper demonstrate that current CMB experiments can detect and resolve gas profiles in low mass halos and at high redshifts, which are the most sensitive to feedback in galaxy formation and the most difficult to measure any other way. They will be a crucial input to cosmological hydrodynamical simulations, thus improving our understanding of galaxy formation. These precise gas profiles arc already sufficient to reduce the main limiting theoretical systematic in galaxy-galaxy lensing: baryonic uncertainties. Future such measurements will thus unleash the statistical power of weak lensing from the Rubin, Euclid and Roman observatories. Our stacking software ThumbStackis publicly available and directly applicable to future Simons Observatory and CMB-S4 data.

Automated summary

This research utilizes combined microwave maps from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and Planck satellite, along with galaxy catalogs from astrophysical surveys, to study the gas properties in galaxy clusters. The results reveal important information about the gas density profile compared to dark matter, and also measure both tSZ and kSZ signals, providing insights into the internal gas dynamics of galaxy groups.