Mass and pressure constraints on galaxy clusters from interferometric SZ observations

TL;DR

This study uses simulated interferometric SZ observations to analyze galaxy cluster mass and pressure profiles, emphasizing the importance of accounting for mass and redshift dependencies in unbiased estimations.

Contribution

It introduces a Bayesian analysis method that incorporates mass and redshift dependencies to accurately recover cluster properties from simulated SZ data.

Findings

Mass and redshift dependence of halo concentration is crucial for unbiased mass estimates.

The Bayesian method successfully recovers input cluster parameters from simulated data.

Profiles of total mass and gas pressure are derived out to r200 with minimal bias.

Abstract

Following on our previous study of an analytic parametric model to describe the baryonic and dark matter distributions in clusters of galaxies with spherical symmetry, we perform an SZ analysis of a set of simulated clusters and present their mass and pressure profiles. The simulated clusters span a wide range in mass, 2.0 x 10^14 Msun < M200 < 1.0 x 10^15Msun, and observations with the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager (AMI) are simulated through their Sunyaev- Zel'dovich (SZ) effect. We assume that the dark matter density follows a Navarro, Frenk and White (NFW) profile and that the gas pressure is described by a generalised NFW (GNFW) profile. By numerically exploring the probability distributions of the cluster parameters given simulated interferometric SZ data in the context of Bayesian methods, we investigate the capability of this model and analysis technique to return the simulated clusters input quantities. We show that considering the mass and redshift dependency of the cluster halo concentration parameter is crucial in obtaining an unbiased cluster mass estimate and hence deriving the radial profiles of the enclosed total mass and the gas pressure out to r200.