Galaxy Cluster Contribution to the Diffuse Extragalactic Ultraviolet Background

Abstract

The diffuse ultraviolet background radiation has been mapped over most of the sky with 2\arcmin \ resolution using data from the \textit{GALEX} survey. We utilize this map to study the correlation between the UV background and clusters of galaxies discovered via the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect in the \textit{Planck} survey. We use only high Galactic latitude ($|b|>60^{\circ }$) galaxy clusters to avoid contamination by Galactic foregrounds, and we only analyze clusters with a measured redshift. This leaves us with a sample of 142 clusters over the redshift range $0.02\le z\le 0.72$, which we further subdivide into four redshift bins. In analysing our stacked samples binned by redshift, we find evidence for a central excess of UV background light compared to local backgrounds for clusters with $z<0.3$. We then stacked these $z<0.3$ clusters to find a statistically significant excess of $12\pm 2.3$ photon cm${}^{-2}$ s$-1$ sr${}^{-1}$ Å${}^{-1}$ \ over the median of $\sim 380$ photon cm${}^{-2}$ s$-1$ sr${}^{-1}$ Å${}^{-1}$ \ measured around random blank fields. We measure the stacked radial profile of these clusters, and find that the excess UV radiation decays to the level of the background at a radius of $\sim 1$ Mpc, roughly consistent with the maximum radial extent of the clusters. Analysis of possible physical processes contributing to the excess UV brightness indicates that non-thermal emission from relativistic electrons in the intracluster medium and faint, unresolved UV emission from cluster member galaxies and intracluster light are likely the dominant contributors.

9 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in AJ

References in corpus (4)

• Lost but not Forgotten: Intracluster Light in Galaxy Groups and Clusters
• GALEX Diffuse Observations of the Sky: The Data
• Mapping the Diffuse Ultraviolet Sky with GALEX
• Cosmic Gamma-ray Background Radiation