The Three Hundred Project: quest of clusters of galaxies morphology and dynamical state through Zernike Polynomials

TL;DR

This study introduces a novel application of Zernike polynomial decomposition to classify galaxy cluster morphology and dynamical state using synthetic tSZ maps, demonstrating its effectiveness across various redshifts.

Contribution

The paper pioneers the use of Zernike polynomials for galaxy cluster morphology analysis, providing a new method to infer dynamical states from tSZ effect maps.

Findings

Zernike polynomial decomposition can distinguish cluster morphologies effectively.

The method correlates well with previous dynamical state indicators.

Angular resolution impacts the method's effectiveness at high redshifts.

Abstract

The knowledge of the dynamical state of galaxy clusters allows to alleviate systematics when observational data from these objects are applied in cosmological studies. Evidence of correlation between the state and the morphology of the clusters is well studied. The morphology can be inferred by images of the surface brightness in the X-ray band and of the thermal component of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect in the millimetre range. For this purpose, we apply, for the first time, the Zernike polynomial decomposition, a common analytic approach mostly used in adaptive optics to recover aberrated radiation wavefronts at the telescopes pupil plane. With this novel way we expect to correctly infer the morphology of clusters and so possibly, their dynamical state. To verify the reliability of this new approach we use more than 300 synthetic clusters selected in THE THREE HUNDRED project at different redshifts ranging from 0 up to 1.03. Mock maps of the tSZ, quantified with the Compton parameter, $y$-maps, are modelled with Zernike polynomials inside $R_{500}$, the cluster reference radius. We verify that it is possible to discriminate the morphology of each cluster by estimating the contribution of the different polynomials to the fit of the map. The results of this new method are correlated with those of a previous analysis made on the same catalogue, using two parameters that combine either morphological or dynamical-state probes. We underline that instrumental angular resolution of the maps has an impact mainly when we extend this approach to high-redshift clusters.