Mapping the hot gas temperature in galaxy clusters using X-ray and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich imaging [CEA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1706.10230


We propose a method to map the temperature distribution of the hot gas in galaxy clusters that uses resolved images of the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (tSZ) effect in combination with X-ray data. Application to images from the New IRAM KIDs Array (NIKA) and XMM-Newton allows us to measure and determine the spatial distribution of the gas temperature in the merging cluster MACS J0717.5+3745, at z=0.55. Despite the complexity of the target object, we find a good morphological agreement between the temperature maps derived from X-ray spectroscopy only — using XMM-Newton ($T_{\rm XMM}$) and Chandra ($T_{\rm CXO}$) — and the new gas-mass-weighted tSZ+X-ray imaging method ($T_{\rm SZX}$). We correlate the temperatures from tSZ+X-ray imaging and those from X-ray spectroscopy alone, finding that $T_{\rm SZX}$ is higher than $T_{\rm XMM}$ and lower than $T_{\rm CXO}$, by $\sim 10\%$ in both cases. Our results are limited by uncertainties in the geometry of the cluster gas, contamination from kinetic SZ ($\sim 10\%$), and the absolute calibration of the tSZ map ($7\%$). Investigation using a larger sample of clusters would help to minimise these effects.

Read this paper on arXiv…

R. Adam, M. Arnaud, I. Bartalucci, et. al.
Mon, 3 Jul 17
4/51

Comments: Submitted to AA, 8 pages, 4 figures, 1 table