The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Weighing distant clusters with the most ancient light

Abstract

We use gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to measure the mass of the most distant blindly-selected sample of galaxy clusters on which a lensing measurement has been performed to date. In CMB data from the the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and the Planck satellite, we detect the stacked lensing effect from 677 near-infrared-selected galaxy clusters from the Massive and Distant Clusters of WISE Survey (MaDCoWS), which have a mean redshift of $⟨z⟩=1.08$. There are no current optical weak lensing measurements of clusters that match the distance and average mass of this sample. We detect the lensing signal with a significance of $4.2\sigma$. We model the signal with a halo model framework to find the mean mass of the population from which these clusters are drawn. Assuming that the clusters follow Navarro-Frenk-White density profiles, we infer a mean mass of $⟨M_{500c}⟩=\left(1.7\pm 0.4\right)\times 10^{14}{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$. We consider systematic uncertainties from cluster redshift errors, centering errors, and the shape of the NFW profile. These are all smaller than 30% of our reported uncertainty. This work highlights the potential of CMB lensing to enable cosmological constraints from the abundance of distant clusters populating ever larger volumes of the observable Universe, beyond the capabilities of optical weak lensing measurements.

14 pages, 3 figures, matches version accepted in ApJL, code available at https://github.com/ACTCollaboration/madcows_lensing/

References in corpus (5)

• Dark matter halo properties of GAMA galaxy groups from 100 square degrees of KiDS weak lensing data
• Galaxies in X-ray Groups. II. A Weak Lensing Study of Halo Centering
• Evidence of Lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background by Dark Matter Halos
• A Measurement of Gravitational Lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background by Galaxy Clusters Using Data from the South Pole Telescope
• Fundamental Physics from Future Weak-Lensing Calibrated Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Galaxy Cluster Counts

Cited by in corpus (16)

• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR6 Gravitational Lensing Map and Cosmological Parameters
• Strong detection of the CMB lensingxgalaxy weak lensingcross-correlation from ACT-DR4,PlanckLegacy and KiDS-1000
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Summary of DR4 and DR5 Data Products and Data Access
• Augmenting astrophysical scaling relations with machine learning: application to reducing the Sunyaev-Zeldovich flux-mass scatter
• Extending empirical constraints on the SZ-mass scaling relation to higher redshifts via HST weak lensing measurements of nine clusters from the SPT-SZ survey at $z\gtrsim 1$
• Cross-correlation of Planck CMB lensing with DESI galaxy groups
• Atacama Cosmology Telescope measurements of a large sample of candidates from the Massive and Distant Clusters of WISE Survey: Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect confirmation of MaDCoWS candidates using ACT
• Host Dark Matter Halos of SDSS Red and Blue Quasars: No Significant Difference in Large-scale Environment
• The ACT-DR5 MCMF Galaxy Cluster Catalog
• The hydrostatic-to-lensing mass bias from resolved X-ray and optical-IR data
• Cluster profiles from beyond-the-QE CMB lensing mass maps
• A measurement of cluster masses using Planck and SPT-SZ CMB lensing
• A halo model of extragalactic contamination to CMB lensing, delensing, and cross-correlations
• Galaxy cluster mass bias from projected mass maps: The Three Hundred-NIKA2 LPSZ twin samples
• Updated neutrino mass constraints from galaxy clustering and CMB lensing-galaxy cross-correlation measurements
• Small Correlated Against Large Estimator (SCALE) for Cosmic Microwave Background Lensing