Optical Follow-up of Planck Cluster Candidates with Small Instruments

Abstract

We report on the search for optical counterparts of Planck Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) cluster candidates using a 0.6 meter non-professional telescope. Among the observed sources, an unconfirmed candidate, PSZ2 G156.24+22.32, is found to be associated with a region of more than 100 galaxies within a 3 arcminutes radius around the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich maximum signal coordinates. Using 14 hours of cumulated exposure over the Sloan color filters g', r', i', and, z', we estimate the photometric redshift of these galaxies at zphot=0.29 +- 0.08. Using the red-sequence galaxy method gives a photometric redshift of 0.30 +0.03 -0.05. Combined with the Planck SZ proxy mass function, this would favor a cluster of 4.4 x 10^{14} solar masses. This result suggests that a dedicated pool of observatories equipped with such instruments could collectively contribute to optical follow-up programs of massive cluster candidates at moderate redshifts.

arXiv comment12 pages, 6 figures, uses aastex. Red-sequence and richness estimate added, matches published version

References in corpus (39)

• Maps of Dust IR Emission for Use in Estimation of Reddening and CMBR Foregrounds
• Planck 2015 results. XIII. Cosmological parameters
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical Summary
• The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE): Mission Description and Initial On-orbit Performance
• Measuring Reddening with SDSS Stellar Spectra and Recalibrating SFD
• The SIMBAD astronomical database
• The USNO-B Catalog
• The u'g'r'i'z' Standard Star Network
• Galaxy Zoo : Morphologies derived from visual inspection of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The Ninth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
• The universal galaxy cluster pressure profile from a representative sample of nearby systems (REXCESS) and the Y_SZ-M_500 relation
• redMaPPer I: Algorithm and SDSS DR8 Catalog
• Galaxy Clusters Discovered via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect in the 2500-square-degree SPT-SZ survey
• A New Method For Galaxy Cluster Detection I: The Algorithm
• Planck 2013 results. XX. Cosmology from Sunyaev-Zeldovich cluster counts
• The MCXC: a Meta-Catalogue of X-ray detected Clusters of galaxies
• Planck 2013 results. XXIX. Planck catalogue of Sunyaev-Zeldovich sources
• MACS: A quest for the most massive galaxy clusters in the universe
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Selected Galaxy Clusters at 148 GHz from Three Seasons of Data
• A catalog of 132,684 clusters of galaxies identified from Sloan Digital Sky Survey III
• The redMaPPer Galaxy Cluster Catalog From DES Science Verification Data
• MaxBCG: A Red Sequence Galaxy Cluster Finder
• Calibration of the galaxy cluster M_500-Y_X relation with XMM-Newton
• Robust Optical Richness Estimation with Reduced Scatter
• The 160 Square Degree ROSAT Survey: the Revised Catalog of 201 Clusters with Spectroscopic Redshifts
• Planck 2013 results. XXIX. The Planck catalogue of Sunyaev-Zeldovich sources: Addendum
• The First U.S. Naval Observatory Robotic Astrometric Telescope Catalog (URAT1)
• Microwave polarization in the direction of galaxy clusters induced by the CMB quadrupole anisotropy
• SKYNET: an efficient and robust neural network training tool for machine learning in astronomy
• redMaPPer III: A Detailed Comparison of the Planck 2013 and SDSS DR8 RedMaPPer Cluster Catalogs
• Planck intermediate results. XXVI. Optical identification and redshifts of Planck clusters with the RTT150 telescope
• Thermal and kinematic corrections to the microwave background polarization induced by galaxy clusters along the line of sight
• Planck Intermediate Results. XXXVI. Optical identification and redshifts of Planck SZ sources with telescopes in the Canary Islands Observatories
• Probing the Universe on Gigaparsec Scales with Remote Cosmic Microwave Background Quadrupole Measurements
• BAMBI: blind accelerated multimodal Bayesian inference
• Optical Confirmation and Redshift Estimation of the Planck Cluster Candidates overlapping the Pan-STARRS Survey
• RXJ0142.0+2131: I. The galaxy content of an X-ray-luminous galaxy cluster at z=0.28
• Prospects for high-z cluster detections with Planck, based on a follow-up of 28 candidates using MegaCam@CFHT
• Additional spectroscopic redshift measurements for galaxy clusters from the First Planck Catalogue