Constraining AGN Feedback in Massive Ellipticals with South Pole Telescope Measurements of the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect
Energetic feedback due to active galactic nuclei (AGN) is likely to play an important role in the observed anti-hierarchical trend in the evolution of galaxies, and yet the energy injected into the circumgalactic medium by this process is largely unknown. One promising approach to constrain this fee...
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ftdatacite:10.48550/arxiv.1601.01330 2023-05-15T18:22:32+02:00 Constraining AGN Feedback in Massive Ellipticals with South Pole Telescope Measurements of the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect Spacek, Alexander Scannapieco, Evan Cohen, Seth Joshi, Bhavin Mauskopf, Philip 2016 https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1601.01330 https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.01330 unknown arXiv https://dx.doi.org/10.3847/0004-637x/819/2/128 arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/ Astrophysics of Galaxies astro-ph.GA FOS Physical sciences article-journal Article ScholarlyArticle Text 2016 ftdatacite https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1601.01330 https://doi.org/10.3847/0004-637x/819/2/128 2022-04-01T12:04:09Z Energetic feedback due to active galactic nuclei (AGN) is likely to play an important role in the observed anti-hierarchical trend in the evolution of galaxies, and yet the energy injected into the circumgalactic medium by this process is largely unknown. One promising approach to constrain this feedback is through measurements of CMB spectral distortions due to the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect, whose magnitude is directly proportional to the energy input by AGN. Here we co-add South Pole Telescope SZ (SPT-SZ) survey data around a large set of massive quiescent elliptical galaxies at z >= 0.5. We use data from the Blanco Cosmology Survey and VISTA Hemisphere Survey to create a large catalog of galaxies split up into two redshift bins, with 3394 galaxies at 0.5 <= z <= 1.0 and 924 galaxies at 1.0 <= z <= 1.5, with typical stellar masses of 1.5 x 10^11 M_Sun. We then co-add the emission around these galaxies, resulting in a measured tSZ signal at 2.2 sigma significance for the lower redshift bin and a contaminating signal at 1.1 sigma for the higher redshift bin. To remove contamination due to dust emission, we use SPT-SZ source counts to model a contaminant source population in both the SPT-SZ bands and Planck high-frequency bands for a subset of 937 low-redshift galaxies and 240 high-redshift galaxies. This increases our detection to 3.6 sigma for low redshifts and 0.9 sigma for high redshifts. We find the mean angularly-integrated Compton-y values to be 2.2 (-0.7+0.9) x 10^-7 Mpc^2 for low redshifts and 1.7 (-1.8+2.2) x 10^-7 Mpc^2 for high redshifts, corresponding to total thermal energies of 7.6 (-2.3+3.0) x 10^60 ergs and 6.0 (-6.3+7.7) x 10^60 ergs, respectively. These numbers are higher than expected from simple theoretical models that do not include AGN feedback, and serve as constraints that can be applied to current simulations of massive galaxy formation. (abridged) : 23 pages, 13 figures, published in ApJ. Updated to reflect minor changes made for the published paper, plus fixed feedback efficiency results which were off by a factor of 5. The overall results weren't significantly affected Text South pole DataCite Metadata Store (German National Library of Science and Technology) Blanco ENVELOPE(-55.233,-55.233,-61.250,-61.250) South Pole |
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DataCite Metadata Store (German National Library of Science and Technology) |
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ftdatacite |
language |
unknown |
topic |
Astrophysics of Galaxies astro-ph.GA FOS Physical sciences |
spellingShingle |
Astrophysics of Galaxies astro-ph.GA FOS Physical sciences Spacek, Alexander Scannapieco, Evan Cohen, Seth Joshi, Bhavin Mauskopf, Philip Constraining AGN Feedback in Massive Ellipticals with South Pole Telescope Measurements of the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect |
topic_facet |
Astrophysics of Galaxies astro-ph.GA FOS Physical sciences |
description |
Energetic feedback due to active galactic nuclei (AGN) is likely to play an important role in the observed anti-hierarchical trend in the evolution of galaxies, and yet the energy injected into the circumgalactic medium by this process is largely unknown. One promising approach to constrain this feedback is through measurements of CMB spectral distortions due to the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect, whose magnitude is directly proportional to the energy input by AGN. Here we co-add South Pole Telescope SZ (SPT-SZ) survey data around a large set of massive quiescent elliptical galaxies at z >= 0.5. We use data from the Blanco Cosmology Survey and VISTA Hemisphere Survey to create a large catalog of galaxies split up into two redshift bins, with 3394 galaxies at 0.5 <= z <= 1.0 and 924 galaxies at 1.0 <= z <= 1.5, with typical stellar masses of 1.5 x 10^11 M_Sun. We then co-add the emission around these galaxies, resulting in a measured tSZ signal at 2.2 sigma significance for the lower redshift bin and a contaminating signal at 1.1 sigma for the higher redshift bin. To remove contamination due to dust emission, we use SPT-SZ source counts to model a contaminant source population in both the SPT-SZ bands and Planck high-frequency bands for a subset of 937 low-redshift galaxies and 240 high-redshift galaxies. This increases our detection to 3.6 sigma for low redshifts and 0.9 sigma for high redshifts. We find the mean angularly-integrated Compton-y values to be 2.2 (-0.7+0.9) x 10^-7 Mpc^2 for low redshifts and 1.7 (-1.8+2.2) x 10^-7 Mpc^2 for high redshifts, corresponding to total thermal energies of 7.6 (-2.3+3.0) x 10^60 ergs and 6.0 (-6.3+7.7) x 10^60 ergs, respectively. These numbers are higher than expected from simple theoretical models that do not include AGN feedback, and serve as constraints that can be applied to current simulations of massive galaxy formation. (abridged) : 23 pages, 13 figures, published in ApJ. Updated to reflect minor changes made for the published paper, plus fixed feedback efficiency results which were off by a factor of 5. The overall results weren't significantly affected |
format |
Text |
author |
Spacek, Alexander Scannapieco, Evan Cohen, Seth Joshi, Bhavin Mauskopf, Philip |
author_facet |
Spacek, Alexander Scannapieco, Evan Cohen, Seth Joshi, Bhavin Mauskopf, Philip |
author_sort |
Spacek, Alexander |
title |
Constraining AGN Feedback in Massive Ellipticals with South Pole Telescope Measurements of the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect |
title_short |
Constraining AGN Feedback in Massive Ellipticals with South Pole Telescope Measurements of the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect |
title_full |
Constraining AGN Feedback in Massive Ellipticals with South Pole Telescope Measurements of the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect |
title_fullStr |
Constraining AGN Feedback in Massive Ellipticals with South Pole Telescope Measurements of the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect |
title_full_unstemmed |
Constraining AGN Feedback in Massive Ellipticals with South Pole Telescope Measurements of the Thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect |
title_sort |
constraining agn feedback in massive ellipticals with south pole telescope measurements of the thermal sunyaev-zel'dovich effect |
publisher |
arXiv |
publishDate |
2016 |
url |
https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1601.01330 https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.01330 |
long_lat |
ENVELOPE(-55.233,-55.233,-61.250,-61.250) |
geographic |
Blanco South Pole |
geographic_facet |
Blanco South Pole |
genre |
South pole |
genre_facet |
South pole |
op_relation |
https://dx.doi.org/10.3847/0004-637x/819/2/128 |
op_rights |
arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/ |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1601.01330 https://doi.org/10.3847/0004-637x/819/2/128 |
_version_ |
1766201949253795840 |