Constraining the Baryon Abundance with the Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect: Projected-Field Detection Using Planck, WMAP, and unWISE

Abstract

The kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect -- the Doppler boosting of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons scattering off free electrons with non-zero line-of-sight velocity -- is an excellent probe of the distribution of baryons in the Universe. In this paper, we measure the kSZ effect due to ionized gas traced by infrared-selected galaxies from the \emph{unWISE} catalog. We employ the "projected-field" kSZ estimator, which does not require spectroscopic galaxy redshifts. To suppress non-kSZ foreground signals associated with the galaxies (e.g., dust emission and thermal SZ), this estimator requires cleaned CMB maps, which we obtain from \emph{Planck} and \emph{WMAP} data. Using a new "asymmetric" estimator that combines different foreground-cleaned CMB maps to maximize the signal-to-noise, we measure the kSZ${}^2$-galaxy cross-power spectrum for three subsamples of the \emph{unWISE} galaxy catalog, which peak at mean redshifts $z\approx$ 0.6, 1.1, and 1.5, have average halo mass $\sim 1$-$5\times 10^{13}$ $h^{-1}{M}_{\odot }$, and in total contain over 500 million galaxies. After marginalizing over CMB lensing contributions, we measure the amplitude of the kSZ signal $A_{\mathrm{kS}{\mathrm{Z}}^2}=0.42\pm 0.31(stat.)\pm 0.14(sys.)$, $5.02\pm 1.01(stat.)\pm 0.47(sys.)$, and $8.23\pm 3.23(stat.)\pm 1.60(sys.)$, for the three subsamples, where $A_{\mathrm{kS}{\mathrm{Z}}^2}=1$ corresponds to our fiducial model. The combined kSZ detection S/N $>$ 5. We discuss possible explanations for the excess kSZ signal associated with the $z\approx 1.1$ sample, and show that foreground contamination in the CMB maps is very unlikely to be the cause. Our measurements illustrate clearly that no baryons are missing on large scales at low redshifts.

arXiv commentMatches the version accepted for publication in PRD (https://journals.aps.org/prd/accepted/d907bQ13Oae1fd21e4ff4f13177300acb1c23e88e)

References in corpus (69)

• emcee: The MCMC Hammer
• Planck 2015 results. XIII. Cosmological parameters
• A Universal Density Profile from Hierarchical Clustering
• Gaia Data Release 2. Summary of the contents and survey properties
• The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE): Mission Description and Initial On-orbit Performance
• The Gaia mission
• HEALPix -- a Framework for High Resolution Discretization, and Fast Analysis of Data Distributed on the Sphere
• Nine-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Final Maps and Results
• The Cosmic Linear Anisotropy Solving System (CLASS) II: Approximation schemes
• Halo Models of Large Scale Structure
• The Simons Observatory: Science goals and forecasts
• The COSMOS2015 Catalog: Exploring the 1<z<6 Universe with half a million galaxies
• Revising the Halofit Model for the Nonlinear Matter Power Spectrum
• Weak Gravitational Lensing of the CMB
• First Results from the TNG50 Simulation: Galactic outflows driven by supernovae and black hole feedback
• The Large Scale Bias of Dark Matter Halos: Numerical Calibration and Model Tests
• Dark matter halo concentrations in the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe year 5 cosmology
• First Results from the TNG50 Simulation: The evolution of stellar and gaseous disks across cosmic time
• Preliminary Results from NEOWISE: An Enhancement to the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for Solar System Science
• Initial Performance of the NEOWISE Reactivation Mission
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR4 Maps and Cosmological Parameters
• A census of baryons in the Universe from localized fast radio bursts
• Primordial Nucleosynthesis in the Precision Cosmology Era
• Extended Limber Approximation
• Planck 2018 results. IV. Diffuse component separation
• A unified pseudo-$C_{\ell }$ framework
• The unWISE Catalog: Two Billion Infrared Sources from Five Years of WISE Imaging
• The Search for the Missing Baryons at Low Redshift
• Calibrating Redshift Distributions Beyond Spectroscopic Limits with Cross-Correlations
• Planck 2015 results. IX. Diffuse component separation: CMB maps
• Evidence of Galaxy Cluster Motions with the Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect
• Simulations of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Power Spectrum with AGN Feedback
• Planck 2013 results. IX. HFI spectral response
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Combined kinematic and thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich measurements from BOSS CMASS and LOWZ halos
• The Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect with Projected Fields: A Novel Probe of the Baryon Distribution with Planck, WMAP, and WISE Data
• The DECam Plane Survey: Optical photometry of two billion objects in the southern Galactic plane
• Evidence for the kinematic Sunyaev-Zeľdovich effect with ACTPol and velocity reconstruction from BOSS
• The CatWISE Preliminary Catalog: Motions from $WISE$ and $NEOWISE$ Data
• Detection of Thermal SZ -- CMB Lensing Cross-Correlation in Planck Nominal Mission Data
• Detection of the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect with DES Year 1 and SPT
• On using angular cross-correlations to determine source redshift distributions
• Full-depth Coadds of the WISE and First-year NEOWISE-Reactivation Images
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A CMB lensing mass map over 2100 square degrees of sky and its cross-correlation with BOSS-CMASS galaxies
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR5 maps of 18,000 square degrees of the microwave sky from ACT 2008-2018 data
• Dark Energy from the Thermal Sunyaev Zeldovich Power Spectrum
• A Measurement of the Kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Signal Toward MACS J0717.5+3745
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Component-separated maps of CMB temperature and the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect
• An improved fitting formula for the dark matter bispectrum
• Deep Full-sky Coadds from Three Years of WISE and NEOWISE Observations
• Mitigating Foreground Biases in CMB Lensing Reconstruction Using Cleaned Gradients
• The Tau of Galaxy Clusters
• The Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect with Projected Fields II: prospects, challenges, and comparison with simulations
• Reionization on Large Scales III: Predictions for Low-ell Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization and High-ell Kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Observables
• unWISE tomography of Planck CMB lensing
• unWISE Coadds: The Five-year Data Set
• Joint Planck and WMAP CMB Map Reconstruction
• Future constraints on halo thermodynamics from combined Sunyaev-Zel'dovich measurements
• Tomographic measurement of the intergalactic gas pressure through galaxy-tSZ cross-correlations
• Beyond the Damping Tail: Cross-Correlating the Kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect with Cosmic Shear
• Planck intermediate results. XXXVII. Evidence of unbound gas from the kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect
• Bias to CMB Lensing Reconstruction from Temperature Anisotropies due to Large-Scale Galaxy Motions
• Sparse component separation for accurate CMB map estimation
• Imaging the Thermal and Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect Signals in a Sample of Ten Massive Galaxy Clusters: Constraints on Internal Velocity Structures and Bulk Velocities
• Foreground Biases on Primordial Non-Gaussianity Measurements from the CMB Temperature Bispectrum: Implications for Planck and Beyond
• Direct detection of the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect in galaxy clusters
• Partially Constrained Internal Linear Combination: a method for low-noise CMB foreground mitigation
• Measuring patchy reionisation with kSZ${}^2$-21 cm correlations
• The 21 cm-kSZ-kSZ Bispectrum during the Epoch of Reionization
• Non-Gaussianity of secondary anisotropies from ACTPol and Planck

Cited by in corpus (26)

• Redshift Estimation and Constraints on Intergalactic and Interstellar Media from Dispersion and Scattering of Fast Radio Bursts
• Baryonic feedback biases on fundamental physics from lensed CMB power spectra
• Projected-Field Kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Cross-Correlations: Halo Model and Forecasts
• Velocity reconstruction with the cosmic microwave background and galaxy surveys
• Ultra-light axions and the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect
• Backlighting extended gas halos around luminous red galaxies: kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect from DESI Y1 x ACT
• The Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect with ACT, DES, and BOSS: a Novel Hybrid Estimator
• Constraining the galaxy-halo connection of infrared-selected unWISE galaxies with galaxy clustering and galaxy-CMB lensing power spectra
• Prospects for kSZ${}^2$-Galaxy Cross-Correlations during Reionization
• Extragalactic CO emission lines in the CMB experiments: a forgotten signal and a foreground
• Improved Modeling of the Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Projected-Fields signal and its Cosmological Dependence
• Pairwise kSZ signal extraction efficacy and optical depth estimation
• Boundless baryons: how diffuse gas contributes to anisotropic tSZ signal around simulated Three Hundred clusters
• A new "temperature inversion" estimator to detect CMB patchy screening by large-scale structure
• On the contributions of extragalactic CO emission lines to ground-based CMB observations
• A high-resolution view of the filament of gas between Abell 399 and Abell 401 from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and MUSTANG-2
• Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST) Science: Resolving the Hot and Ionized Universe through the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect
• Breaking the ${\tau }_{\mathrm{T}}-f$ degeneracy of the kinetic Sunyaev Zel'dovich cosmology in redshift space
• Doppler boosted dust emission and CIB-galaxy cross-correlations: a new probe of cosmology and astrophysics
• kSZ Pairwise Velocity Reconstruction with Machine Learning
• A Novel Bispectrum Estimator of the Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect using Projected Fields
• The Circumgalactic Medium from the CAMELS Simulations: Forecasting Constraints on Feedback Processes from Future Sunyaev-Zeldovich Observations
• Estimators for the cross-pairwise kSZ effect: forecasts for the dark energy and modified gravity parameters with Simons Observatory and CMB-S4
• Cross-correlating the patchy screening and kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects as a new probe of reionization
• Cluster optical depth and pairwise velocity estimation using machine learning
• On the capability of high redshift kSZ measurement with galaxy surveys