The Massive and Distant Clusters of WISE Survey 2: Detection of splashback radii in galaxy cluster total light stacks

TL;DR

This paper detects the splashback radius in galaxy clusters using total light image stacks from WISE data, demonstrating a new method that complements galaxy-based measurements and can probe high-redshift cluster evolution.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel total light stacking technique to measure splashback radii, providing an alternative approach that is effective even when only faint galaxies are detectable.

Findings

Splashback radii are consistent with previous galaxy-based measurements.

Total light stacking is sensitive to faint galaxies, aiding high-redshift studies.

Systematic errors are small and well-controlled.

Abstract

The splashback radius, the radius of the apocenter of the first orbit of infalling material, is a measurable quantity marking the boundary between a galaxy cluster and its infalling region. We report detections of splashback radii in total light stacks, i.e. image stacks centered on the cores of galaxy clusters. Our analysis uses Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) W1 and W2 images of 83,345 candidate clusters at $0.5 \lesssim z \lesssim 1.9$ from the Massive and Distant Clusters of WISE Survey 2 (MaDCoWS2). The clusters are organized in stacks by redshift and signal-to-noise ($S\slash N$) ratios. We adopt a statistical approach, using 1000 bootstrap realizations to determine the median projected splashback radius and its confidence interval in a given bin. We compare our splashback radii with the measurements made by K. Thongkham et al. on a similar sample of MaDCoWS2 clusters using galaxy-cluster cross-correlation and find that they are consistent, although our method yields larger error bars. Our main systematic error is the accuracy of the background subtraction, but its impact remains small: the consistency of K. Thongkham et al. and our results suggests that neither method suffers from large systematics. The sensitivity of total light stacking to the contribution of faint galaxies can be advantageous to locate splashback radii when only the brightest galaxies are detected in individual images, such as at high redshifts. We present a potential application of this new technique to probe the evolution of the stellar mass in cluster infalling regions.