Miscentering of Optical Galaxy Clusters Based on Sunyaev-Zeldovich Counterparts

TL;DR

This study investigates the miscentering effect in galaxy clusters by cross-matching optical and SZ catalogs, quantifying miscentering fractions, and analyzing its impact on lensing signals, revealing astrophysical and systematic causes of offsets.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of miscentering in galaxy clusters, distinguishing astrophysical from systematic causes, and assesses the impact on lensing measurements, using combined optical and SZ data.

Findings

Approximately 25% of clusters are miscentered beyond 330 kpc.

Removing non-astrophysical causes reduces miscentering to about 10%.

Miscentering significantly diminishes the lensing signal within 1 Mpc.

Abstract

The "miscentering effect," i.e., the offset between a galaxy cluster's optically-defined center and the center of its gravitational potential, is a significant systematic effect on brightest cluster galaxy (BCG) studies and cluster lensing analyses. We perform a cross-match between the optical cluster catalog from the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) Survey S19A Data Release and the Sunyaev-Zeldovich cluster catalog from Data Release 5 of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). We obtain a sample of 186 clusters in common in the redshift range $0.1 \leq z \leq 1.4$ over an area of 469 deg$^2$. By modeling the distribution of centering offsets in this fiducial sample, we find a miscentered fraction (corresponding to clusters offset by more than 330 kpc) of ~25%, a value consistent with previous miscentering studies. We examine the image of each miscentered cluster in our sample and identify one of several reasons to explain the miscentering. Some clusters show significant miscentering for astrophysical reasons, i.e., ongoing cluster mergers. Others are miscentered due to non-astrophysical, systematic effects in the HSC data or the cluster-finding algorithm. After removing all clusters with clear, non-astrophysical causes of miscentering from the sample, we find a considerably smaller miscentered fraction, ~10%. We show that the gravitational lensing signal within 1 Mpc of miscentered clusters is considerably smaller than that of well-centered clusters, and we suggest that the ACT SZ centers are a better estimate of the true cluster potential centroid.