The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Probing the Baryon Content of SDSS DR15 Galaxies with the Thermal and Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effects
Creators: name: Vavagiakis, Eve M.
name: Gallardo, Patricio A.
name: Calafut, Victoria
name: Amodeo, Stefania
name: Aiola, Simone
name: Austermann, Jason E.
name: Battaglia, Nicholas
name: Battistelli, Elia S.
name: Beall, James A.
name: Bean, Rachel
name: Bond, J. Richard
name: Calabrese, Erminia
name: Choi, Steve K.
name: Cothard, Nicholas F.
name: Devlin, Mark J.
name: Duell, Cody J.
name: Duff, S. M.
name: Duivenvoorden, Adriaan J.
name: Dunkley, Jo
name: Dunner, Rolando
name: Ferraro, Simone
name: Guan, Yilun
name: Hill, J. Colin
name: Hilton, Matt
name: Hlozek, Renee
name: Huber, Zachary B.
name: Hubmayr, Johannes
name: Huffenberger, Kevin M.
name: Hughes, John P.
name: Koopman, Brian J.
name: Kosowsky, Arthur
name: Li, Yaqiong
name: Lokken, Martine
name: Madhavacheril, Mathew
name: McMahon, Jeff
name: Moodley, Kavilan
name: Naess, Sigurd
name: Nati, Federico
name: Newburgh, Laura B.
name: Niemack, Michael D.
name: Page, Lyman
name: Partridge, Bruce
name: Schaan, Emmanuel
name: Schillaci, Alessandro
name: Sifon, Cristobal
name: Spergel, David N.
name: Staggs, Suzanne T.
name: Ullom, Joel N.
name: Vale, Leila R.
name: Van Engelen, Alexander
name: Wollack, Edward J.
name: Xu, Zhilei
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: We present high signal-to-noise measurements (up to 12$σ$) of the average thermal Sunyaev Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect from optically selected galaxy groups and clusters and estimate their baryon content within a 2.1$^\prime$ radius aperture. Sources from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) DR15 catalog overlap with 3,700 sq. deg. of sky observed by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) from 2008 to 2018 at 150 and 98 GHz (ACT DR5), and 2,089 sq. deg. of internal linear combination component-separated maps combining ACT and $\it{Planck}$ data (ACT DR4). The corresponding optical depths, $\barτ$, which depend on the baryon content of the halos, are estimated using results from cosmological hydrodynamic simulations assuming an AGN feedback radiative cooling model. We estimate the mean mass of the halos in multiple luminosity bins, and compare the tSZ-based $\barτ$ estimates to theoretical predictions of the baryon content for a Navarro-Frenk-White profile. We do the same for $\barτ$ estimates extracted from fits to pairwise baryon momentum measurements of the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (kSZ) for the same data set obtained in a companion paper. We find that the $\barτ$ estimates from the tSZ measurements in this work and the kSZ measurements in the companion paper agree within $1σ$ for two out of the three disjoint luminosity bins studied, while they differ by 2-3$σ$ in the highest luminosity bin. The optical depth estimates account for one third to all of the theoretically predicted baryon content in the halos across luminosity bins. Potential systematic uncertainties are discussed. The tSZ and kSZ measurements provide a step towards empirical Compton-$\bar{y}$-$\barτ$ relationships to provide new tests of cluster formation and evolution models.
description: 19 pages, 9 figures