Search NASA⌕ Search

Engineering topics

Shin, Tae-hyeon

Publications and source records attributed to Shin, Tae-hyeon.

The impact of halo concentration on the Sunyaev Zel’dovich effect signal from massive galaxy clusters

ABSTRACT The Sunyaev Zel’dovich (SZ) effect is sensitive to the pressure of ionized gas inside galaxy clusters, which is in turn controlled largely by the gravitational potential of the cluster. Changing the concentration parameter describing the cluster mass distribution impacts the gravitational potential and thus the cluster SZ signal, with implications for cosmological and other analyses of SZ-selected clusters. We investigate the concentration–SZ relation in theory and simulations. We find that the impact of concentration on the inner SZ profile (R ≲ 0.75R200c) can be captured with standard polytropic gas models. However, we find that such models do a poor job of reproducing the outer SZ profiles (R ≳ 0.75R200c) and the relation between the integrated SZ signal, Y, and concentration. This disagreement results from a sharp truncation of the gas pressure profile near the splashback radius, likely caused by virial shocks. We develop a simple description of the truncation that leads to a good match with the simulated SZ profiles out to several R200c for clusters of varying mass and concentration, and that also accurately predicts the concentration–Y relationship. Finally, we determine how inference of the linear bias parameter and splashback radius for SZ-selected clusters can be biased by ignoring the concentration dependence of the SZ signal, finding that bias to the former is essentially negligible, while bias to the latter can be as much as 2 per cent.

Astronomy & Astrophysics↗

What sets the splashback radius of dark matter haloes: accretion history or other properties?

The density profiles of dark matter haloes contain rich information about their growth history and physical properties. One particularly interesting region is the splashback radius, R sp , which marks the transition between particles orbiting in the halo and particles undergoing first infall. While the dependence of R sp on the recent accretion rate is well-established and theoretically expected, it is not clear exactly what parts of the accretion history R sp responds to, and what other halo properties might additionally influence its position. Here, we comprehensively investigate these questions by correlating the dynamically measured splashback radii of a large set of simulated haloes with their individual growth histories as well as their structural, dynamical, and environmental properties. We find that R sp is sensitive to the accretion over one crossing time but largely insensitive to the prior history (in contrast to concentration, which probes earlier epochs). All secondary correlations are much weaker, but we discern a relatively higher R sp in less massive, older, more elliptical, and more tidally deformed haloes. Despite these minor influences, we conclude that the splashback radius is a clean indicator of a halo’s growth over the past dynamical time. We predict that the magnitude gap should be a promising observable indicator of a halo’s accretion rate and splashback radius.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Probing Galaxy Evolution in Massive Clusters Using ACT and DES: Splashback as a Cosmic Clock

In this work, we measure the projected number density profiles of galaxies and the splashback feature in clusters selected by the Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect from the Advanced Atacama Cosmology Telescope (AdvACT) survey using galaxies observed by the Dark Energy Survey (DES). The splashback radius is consistent with CDM-only simulations and is located at 2.4$_{-0.4}^{+0.3}$ Mpch -1 . We split the galaxies on color and find significant differences in their profile shapes. Red and green-valley galaxies show a splashback-like minimum in their slope profile consistent with theory, while the bluest galaxies show a weak feature at a smaller radius. We develop a mapping of galaxies to subhalos in simulations and assign colors based on infall time onto their hosts. We find that the shift in location of the steepest slope and different profile shapes can be mapped to the average time of infall of galaxies of different colors. The steepest slope traces a discontinuity in the phase space of dark matter halos. By relating spatial profiles to infall time, we can use splashback as a clock to understand galaxy quenching. We find that red galaxies have on average been in clusters over 3.2 Gyr, green galaxies about 2.2 Gyr, while blue galaxies have been accreted most recently and have not reached apocenter. Using the full radial profiles, we fit a simple quenching model and find that the onset of galaxy quenching occurs after a delay of about a gigayear and that galaxies quench rapidly thereafter with an exponential timescale of 0.6 Gyr.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗