Measuring Gravitational Redshifts in Galaxy Clusters

TL;DR

This paper refines the understanding of gravitational redshift measurements in galaxy clusters by analyzing additional relativistic effects and observational biases, showing that these factors significantly alter the expected redshift profiles.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive model accounting for light cone bias, transverse Doppler effects, and weighting schemes, improving the interpretation of gravitational redshift observations in galaxy clusters.

Findings

Observed redshift bias includes gravitational potential and velocity effects.

Weighting by photon flux reverses the sign of the redshift effect.

Infall and outflow effects are negligible at small scales but relevant at larger scales.

Abstract

Wojtak {\it et al} have stacked 7,800 clusters from the SDSS survey in redshift space. They find a small net blue-shift for the cluster galaxies relative to the brightest cluster galaxies, which agrees quite well with the gravitational redshift from GR. Zhao {\it et al.} have pointed out that, in addition to the gravitational redshift, one would expect to see transverse Doppler (TD) redshifts, and that these two effects are generally of the same order. Here we show that there are other corrections that are also of the same order of magnitude. The fact that we observe galaxies on our past light cone results in a bias such that more of the galaxies observed are moving away from us in the frame of the cluster than are moving towards us. This causes the observed average redshift to be $\langle \delta z \rangle = -\langle \Phi \rangle + \langle \beta^2 \rangle / 2 + \langle \beta_x^2 \rangle$, with $\beta_x$ is the line of sight velocity. That is if we average over galaxies with equal weight. If the galaxies in each cluster are weighted by their fluence, or equivalently if we do not resolve the moving sources, and make an average of the mean redshift giving equal weight per photon, the observed redshift is then opposite to the usual transverse Doppler effect. In the WHH experiment, the weighting is a step-function because of the flux-limit for inclusion in the spectroscopic sample and the result is different again, and depends on the details of the luminosity function and the SEDs of the galaxies. Including these effects substantially modifies the blue-shift profile. We show that in-fall and out-flow have very small effect over the relevant range of impact parameters but become important on larger scales.