PANCO2: a new software to measure pressure profiles from resolved thermal SZ observations

TL;DR

PANCO2 is a fast, flexible software tool for measuring galaxy cluster pressure profiles from high-resolution thermal SZ observations, accounting for observational effects and allowing non-parametric profile analysis.

Contribution

The software introduces a forward modeling approach that incorporates observational features and enables non-parametric pressure profile measurements from thermal SZ data.

Findings

Successfully validated on synthetic maps and hydrodynamical simulations.

Capable of extracting pressure profiles and confidence intervals within minutes.

Supports detection of pressure features beyond smooth parametric models.

Abstract

We have developed a new software to perform the measurement of galaxy cluster pressure profiles from high angular resolution thermal SZ observations. The code allows the user to take into account various features of millimeter observations, such as point spread function (PSF) convolution, pipeline filtering, correlated residual noise, and point source contamination, in a forward modeling approach. One of the key advantages of the code is the possibility to use binned, non-parametric pressure profiles, enabling the detection of pressure features better than smooth functions such as the traditionally used generalized Navarro-Frenk-White profile. Another major upside is the performance of the software, enabling the extraction of the pressure profile and associated confidence intervals via MCMC sampling in times as short as a few minutes. We present the code and its validation on various realistic synthetic maps, of ideal spherical clusters, as well as of realistic, hydrodynamically simulated objects. We plan to publicly release the software in the coming months.