A Multi-wavelength Study of Optically Selected Galaxy Clusters from the Blanco Cosmology Survey

Download or read book A Multi-wavelength Study of Optically Selected Galaxy Clusters from the Blanco Cosmology Survey written by Lindsey Ellen Bleem and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abundance measurements of galaxy clusters provide powerful constraints of cosmology. The observed distribution of clusters can potentially be used to disentangle whether the accelerated cosmic expansion can be explained by a modification to Einstein's theory of gravity or whether the explanation involves a new form of 'dark' energy. Such growth of structure measurements are both complementary to and provide an important cross-check of measurements of the geometry of the universe. There are two key requirements for cosmology with galaxy clusters: a census of these systems through cosmic time and the ability to connect the measured signal with the underlying mass of the galaxy cluster. In this era of large-area millimeter and optical wavelength surveys (including the South Pole Telescope (SPT) 2500-square-degree SZ-Survey and the Dark Energy Survey (DES)) where hundreds (mm-wave) to hundreds of thousands (optical) of clusters will be detected, the most serious limitation to cluster cosmology remains understanding and calibrating observable-mass relations. Combining cluster observables across wavelengths can both test and inform our knowledge of such scaling relations. As a pilot program for future explorations of the combined SPT and DES datasets, we explore the relation between the optical-richness, lambda, and SZ-signal for a sample of 567 optically-selected clusters from the Blanco Cosmology Survey, an ~ 80 square-degree survey located within the SPT-SZ survey. In this study we detect SZ-signal at increasing significance as a function of cluster richness but find that the recovered signal falls below expectations derived from models based on X-ray samples. We explore possible biases to our recovered signal and find that contamination from cluster members -- in particular radio and dust emission from galaxies--is small and that the majority of the discrepancy at the high mass end can be explained by errors in identifying the optical centers of clusters. The toolset developed here can be combined with future cluster catalogs from the Dark Energy Survey to help improve mass-richness scaling relations and ultimately constrain cosmological models.