Rees--Sciama Effect and Impact of Foreground Structures on Galaxy Redshifts

TL;DR

This paper investigates the Rees--Sciama effect of superstructures on CMB temperature fluctuations and galaxy redshifts, revealing small but measurable impacts that are challenging to detect observationally.

Contribution

It provides a numerical analysis of the RS effect on both CMB and galaxy redshifts, highlighting the cancellation of effects and potential for statistical detection.

Findings

Superstructures can cause micro Kelvin temperature fluctuations in the CMB.

The redshift change due to superstructures is at the percent level of large-scale velocities.

Tiny redshift differences in lensed images relate to the Hubble rate but are observationally infeasible.

Abstract

We estimate the Rees--Sciama (RS) effect of super structures on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature fluctuations and identify a related effect on galaxy redshifts. By numerically solving the geodesic equation, we find that both superclusters and supervoids can decrease the temperature of the CMB by several micro Kelvin in the central region and increase the temperature slightly in the surrounding area due to the RS effect. The two components of the RS effect, redshift and gravitational time delay, largely cancel each other, leaving an equivalent but much smaller effect on the CMB photons that started out at the same time from the distorted last scattering surface. For galaxies, the time delay effect is separable from the redshift effect, and the slight change to the redshift induced by super structures can be at the percent level of large-scale rms bulk velocities, which might only be detected statistically. On much smaller scales, a tiny redshift difference between two images of a strongly lensed source should exist in general, which is related to the Hubble expansion rate at the source redshift. However, as Loeb (1998) pointed out, observational issues and the proper motion of the structure would make such a measurement impossible.