Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Modeling the gas thermodynamics in BOSS CMASS galaxies from kinematic and thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich measurements

Abstract

The thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effects (tSZ, kSZ) probe the thermodynamic properties of the circumgalactic and intracluster medium (CGM and ICM) of galaxies, groups, and clusters, since they are proportional, respectively, to the integrated electron pressure and momentum along the line of sight. We present constraints on the gas thermodynamics of CMASS (constant stellar mass) galaxies in the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey using new measurements of the kSZ and tSZ signals obtained in a companion paper [Schaan et al.]. Combining kSZ and tSZ measurements, we measure within our model the amplitude of energy injection εM⋆c², where M⋆ is the stellar mass, to be ε = (40±9)×10⁻⁶, and the amplitude of the nonthermal pressure profile to be α_(Nth) < 0.2(2σ), indicating that less than 20% of the total pressure within the virial radius is due to a nonthermal component. We estimate the effects of including baryons in the modeling of weak-lensing galaxy cross-correlation measurements using the best-fit density profile from the kSZ measurement. Our estimate reduces the difference between the original theoretical model and the weak-lensing galaxy cross-correlation measurements in [A. Leauthaud et al., Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 467, 3024 (2017)] by half (50% at most), but does not fully reconcile it. Comparing the kSZ and tSZ measurements to cosmological simulations, we find that they underpredict the CGM pressure and to a lesser extent the CGM density at larger radii with probabilities to exceed ranging from 0.00 to 0.03 and 0.12 to 0.14, for tSZ and kSZ, respectively. This suggests that the energy injected via feedback models in the simulations that we compared against does not sufficiently heat the gas at these radii. We do not find significant disagreement at smaller radii. These measurements provide novel tests of current and future simulations. This work demonstrates the power of joint, high signal-to-noise kSZ and tSZ observations, upon which future cross-correlation studies will improve.