Improved Constraints on Cosmic Microwave Background Secondary Anisotropies from the Complete 2008 South Pole Telescope Data

• Published in: The Astrophysical Journal
• Main Authors: Shirokoff, E., Lueker, M., Padin, S., Vieira, J. D.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Astronomical Society 2011
• Subjects: cosmic background radiation; cosmology: observations; large-scale structure of universe; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/736/1/61

We report measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum from the complete 2008 South Pole Telescope (SPT) data set. We analyze twice as much data as the first SPT power spectrum analysis, using an improved cosmological parameter estimator which fits multi-frequency models to the SPT 150 and 220 GHz bandpowers. We find an excellent fit to the measured bandpowers with a model that includes lensed primary CMB anisotropy, secondary thermal (tSZ) and kinetic (kSZ) Sunyaev-Zel'dovich anisotropies, unclustered synchrotron point sources, and clustered dusty point sources. In addition to measuring the power spectrum of dusty galaxies at high signal-to-noise, the data primarily constrain a linear combination of the kSZ and tSZ anisotropy contributions at 150 GHz and ℓ = 3000: D^(tSZ) ^(3000) + 0.5 D_(kSZ)^(3000) = 4.5 ± 1.0 μK^2. The 95% confidence upper limits on secondary anisotropy power are D ^(tSZ)_(3000) < 5.3 μK^2 and D^(kSZ)_(3000) < 6.5 μK^2. We also consider the potential correlation of dusty and tSZ sources and find it incapable of relaxing the tSZ upper limit. These results increase the significance of the lower than expected tSZ amplitude previously determined from SPT power spectrum measurements. We find that models including non-thermal pressure support in groups and clusters predict tSZ power in better agreement with the SPT data. Combining the tSZ power measurement with primary CMB data halves the statistical uncertainty on σ8. However, the preferred value of σ8 varies significantly between tSZ models. Improved constraints on cosmological parameters from tSZ power spectrum measurements require continued progress in the modeling of the tSZ power. © 2011 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2010 December 21; accepted 2011 April 25; published 2011 July 6. The South Pole Telescope is supported by the National Science Foundation through grants ANT-0638937 and ANT-0130612. Partial support is also provided by the NSF Physics Frontier Center grant PHY-0114422 to the ...