The Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect with ACT, DES, and BOSS: a Novel Hybrid Estimator

Abstract

The kinematic and thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ and tSZ) effects probe the abundance and thermodynamics of ionized gas in galaxies and clusters. We present a new hybrid estimator to measure the kSZ effect by combining cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropy maps with photometric and spectroscopic optical survey data. The method interpolates a velocity reconstruction from a spectroscopic catalog at the positions of objects in a photometric catalog, which makes it possible to leverage the high number density of the photometric catalog and the precision of the spectroscopic survey. Combining this hybrid kSZ estimator with a measurement of the tSZ effect simultaneously constrains the density and temperature of free electrons in the photometrically selected galaxies. Using the 1000 deg2 of overlap between the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) Data Release 5, the first three years of data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), and the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) Data Release 12, we detect the kSZ signal at 4.8$\sigma$ and reject the null (no-kSZ) hypothesis at 5.1$\sigma$. This corresponds to 2.0$\sigma$ per 100,000 photometric objects with a velocity field based on a spectroscopic survey with 1/5th the density of the photometric catalog. For comparison, a recent ACT analysis using exclusively spectroscopic data from BOSS measured the kSZ signal at 2.1$\sigma$ per 100,000 objects. Our derived constraints on the thermodynamic properties of the galaxy halos are consistent with previous measurements. With future surveys, such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time, we expect that this hybrid estimator could result in measurements with significantly better signal-to-noise than those that rely on spectroscopic data alone.

19 pages, 15 figures - matches published version

References in corpus (12)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• The NumPy array: a structure for efficient numerical computation
• A census of baryons in the Universe from localized fast radio bursts
• Optical Design of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the Millimeter Bolometric Array Camera
• The DECam Local Volume Exploration Survey: Overview and First Data Release
• Detection of the pairwise kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect with BOSS DR11 and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope
• A Measurement of the Galaxy Group-Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect Cross-Correlation Function
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Detection of the Pairwise Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect with SDSS DR15 Galaxies
• Constraining the Baryon Abundance with the Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect: Projected-Field Detection Using Planck, WMAP, and unWISE
• Projected-Field Kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Cross-Correlations: Halo Model and Forecasts
• A measurement of the mean central optical depth of galaxy clusters via the pairwise kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect with SPT-3G and DES
• Field-Based Physical Inference From Peculiar Velocity Tracers

Cited by in corpus (9)

• First Constraints on the Epoch of Reionization Using the non-Gaussianity of the Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel{'}dovich Effect from the South Pole Telescope and {\it Herschel}-SPIRE Observations
• Backlighting extended gas halos around luminous red galaxies: kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect from DESI Y1 x ACT
• Pairwise kSZ signal extraction efficacy and optical depth estimation
• kSZ Pairwise Velocity Reconstruction with Machine Learning
• The imprints of galaxy cluster internal dynamics on the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect
• Cluster optical depth and pairwise velocity estimation using machine learning
• Probing Time-Varying Dark Energy with DESI: The Crucial Role of Precision Matter Density (Ω_{m0}) Measurements
• On the capability of high redshift kSZ measurement with galaxy surveys
• Squared-field cross-correlation between kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect and 21-cm intensity mapping