Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Weighing Distant Clusters with the Most Ancient Light

Creators: Madhavacheril, Mathew S.; Sifón, Cristóbal; Battaglia, Nicholas; Aiola, Simone; Amodeo, Stefania; Austermann, Jason E.; Beall, James A.; Becker, Daniel T.; Bond, J. Richard; Calabrese, Erminia; Choi, Steve K.; Denison, Edward V.; Devlin, Mark J.; Dicker, Simon R.; Duff, Shannon M.; Duivenvoorden, Adriaan J.; Dunkley, Jo; Dünner, Rolando; Ferraro, Simone; Gallardo, Patricio A.; Guan, Yilun; Han, Dongwon; Hill, J. Colin; Hilton, Gene C.; Hilton, Matt; Hubmayr, Johannes; Huffenberger, Kevin M.; Hughes, John P.; Koopman, Brian J.; Kosowsky, Arthur; Van Lanen, Jeff; Lee, Eunseong; Louis, Thibaut; MacInnis, Amanda; McMahon, Jeffrey; Moodley, Kavilan; Naess, Sigurd; Namikawa, Toshiya; Nati, Federico; Newburgh, Laura; Niemack, Michael D.; Page, Lyman A.; Partridge, Bruce; Qu, Frank J.; Robertson, Naomi C.; Salatino, Maria; Schaan, Emmanuel; Schillaci, Alessandro; Schmitt, Benjamin L.; Sehgal, Neelima; Sherwin, Blake D.; Simon, Sara M.; Spergel, David N.; Staggs, Suzanne; Storer, Emilie R.; Ullom, Joel N.; Vale, Leila R.; van Engelen, Alexander; Vavagiakis, Eve M.; Wollack, Edward J.; Xu, Zhilei

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 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 currently no representative 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 4.2σ. 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 (NFW) density profiles, we infer a mean mass of ⟨M_(500c)⟩ = (1.7±0.4)×10¹⁴M⊙. 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.

Additional Information

© 2020 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2020 September 16; revised 2020 September 29; accepted 2020 September 29; published 2020 October 29. We thank Peter Melchior for helpful discussions. Software used for this analysis includes healpy (Zonca et al. 2019), HEALPix (Górski et al. 2005), and Astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018). Research at the Perimeter Institute is supported in part by the Government of Canada through the Department of Innovation, Science and Industry Canada and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Colleges and Universities. C.S. acknowledges support from the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID) through FONDECYT Iniciación grant No. 11191125. N.B. acknowledges support from NSF grant AST-1910021. E.C. acknowledges support from the STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellowship ST/M004856/2 and STFC Consolidated grant ST/S00033X/1, and from the Horizon 2020 ERC Starting Grant (grant agreement No. 849169). J.D. is supported through NSF grant AST-1814971. R.D. thanks CONICYT for grant BASAL CATA AFB-170002. D.H., A.M., and N.S. acknowledge support from NSF grant numbers AST-1513618 and AST-1907657. M.H.i. acknowledges support from the National Research Foundation. J.P.H. acknowledges funding for SZ cluster studies from NSF grant No. AST-1615657. K.M. acknowledges support from the National Research Foundation of South Africa. This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation through awards AST-1440226, AST0965625, and AST-0408698 for the ACT project, as well as awards PHY-1214379 and PHY-0855887. Funding was also provided by Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and a Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) award to UBC. ACT operates in the Parque Astronómico Atacama in northern Chile under the auspices of the Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica de Chile (CONICYT). Computations were performed on the GPC and Niagara supercomputers at the SciNet HPC Consortium. SciNet is funded by the CFI under the auspices of Compute Canada, the Government of Ontario, the Ontario Research Fund—Research Excellence, and the University of Toronto. The development of multichroic detectors and lenses was supported by NASA grants NNX13AE56G and NNX14AB58G. Colleagues at AstroNorte and RadioSky provide logistical support and keep operations in Chile running smoothly. We also thank the Mishrahi Fund and the Wilkinson Fund for their generous support of the project. This document was prepared by Atacama Cosmology Telescope using the resources of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), a U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, HEP User Facility. Fermilab is managed by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC (FRA), acting under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359.

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