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Abstract The thermal Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (tSZ) effect is a powerful tool with the potential for constraining directly the properties of the hot gas that dominates dark matter halos because it measures pressure and thus thermal energy density. Studying this hot component of the circumgalactic medium (CGM) is important because it is strongly impacted by star formation and active galactic nucleus (AGN) activity in galaxies, participating in the feedback loop that regulates star and black hole mass growth in galaxies. We study the tSZ effect across a wide halo-mass range using three cosmological hydrodynamical simulations: Illustris-TNG, EAGLE, and FIRE-2. Specifically, we present the scaling relation between the tSZ signal and halo mass and the (mass-weighted) radial profiles of gas density, temperature, and pressure for all three simulations. The analysis includes comparisons to Planck tSZ observations and to the thermal pressure profile inferred from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) measurements. We compare these tSZ data to simulations to interpret the measurements in terms of feedback and accretion processes in the CGM. We also identify as-yet unobserved potential signatures of these processes that may be visible in future measurements, which will have the capability of measuring tSZ signals to even lower masses. We also perform internal comparisons between runs with different physical assumptions. We conclude (1) there is strong evidence for the impact of feedback atR500, but that this impact decreases by 5R500, and (2) the thermodynamic profiles of the CGM are highly dependent on the implemented model, such as cosmic-ray or AGN feedback prescriptions.
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This content will become publicly available on October 1, 2026
On the impacts of halo model implementations in Sunyaev-Zeldovich cross-correlation analyses
Statistical studies of the circumgalactic medium (CGM) using Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) observations offer a promising method of studying the gas properties of galaxies and the astrophysics that govern their evolution. Forward modeling profiles from theory and simulations allows them to be refined directly off of data, but there are currently significant differences between the thermal SZ (tSZ) observations of the CGM and the predicted tSZ signal. While these discrepancies could be real, they could also be the result of decisions in the forward modeling used to build statistical measures from theory. In order to see effects of this, we compare an analysis utilizing halo occupancy distributions (HODs) implemented in halo models to simulate the galaxy distribution against previous studies, which weighted their results to match the CMASS galaxy sample, which contains nearly one million galaxies, mainly centrals of group-sized halos, selected for relatively uniform stellar mass across redshifts between 0.4 <z< 0.7. We review some of the implementation differences that can account for changes, such as miscentering, one-halo/two-halo cutoff radii, and mass ranges, all of which will need to be given the proper attention in future high-signal-to-noise studies. We find that our more thorough model predicts a signal with a 33% improved fit than the one from previous studies on the exact same sample. Additionally, we find that modifications that change the satellite fraction even by just a few percent, such as editing the halo mass range and certain HOD parameters, result in strong changes in the final signal. Although significant, this discrepancy from the modeling choices is not large enough to completely account for the existing disagreements between simulations and measurements.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2108536
- PAR ID:
- 10654884
- Publisher / Repository:
- IOP Publishing
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
- Volume:
- 2025
- Issue:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 1475-7516
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 051
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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