Issue |
A&A
Volume 693, January 2025
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A182 | |
Number of page(s) | 14 | |
Section | Cosmology (including clusters of galaxies) | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202452285 | |
Published online | 15 January 2025 |
Testing the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich power spectrum of a halo model using hydrodynamical simulations
1
Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, UMR 7095, CNRS & Sorbonne Université, 98 bis Boulevard Arago, F-75014 Paris, France
2
Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, 933 North Cherry Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
3
Department of Physics, University of Arizona, 1118 E. Fourth Street, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
⋆ Corresponding author; emma.aycoberry@iap.fr
Received:
17
September
2024
Accepted:
28
November
2024
Statistical properties of large-scale cosmological structures serve as powerful tools for constraining the cosmological properties of our Universe. Tracing the gas pressure, the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (tSZ) effect is a biased probe of mass distribution and, hence, can be used to test the physics of feedback or cosmological models. Therefore, it is crucial to develop robust modelling of hot gas pressure for applications to tSZ surveys. Since gas collapses into bound structures, it is expected that most of the tSZ signal is within halos produced by cosmic accretion shocks. Hence, simple empirical halo models can be used to predict the tSZ power spectra. In this study, we employed the HMx halo model to compare the tSZ power spectra with those of several hydrodynamical simulations: the Horizon suite and the Magneticum simulation. We examine various contributions to the tSZ power spectrum across different redshifts, including the one- and two-halo term decomposition, the amount of bound gas, the importance of different masses, and the electron pressure profiles. Our comparison of the tSZ power spectrum reveals discrepancies between the halo model and cosmological simulations that increase with redshift. We find a 20% to 50% difference between the measured and predicted tSZ angular power spectrum over the multipole range ℓ = 103 − 104. Our analysis reveals that these differences are driven by the excess of power in the predicted two-halo term at low k and in the one-halo term at high k. At higher redshifts (z ∼ 3), simulations indicate that more power comes from outside the virial radius than from inside, suggesting a limitation in the applicability of the halo model. We also observe differences in the pressure profiles, despite the fair level of agreement on the tSZ power spectrum at low redshift with the default calibration of the halo model. In conclusion, our study suggests that the properties of the halo model need to be carefully controlled against real or mock data to be proven useful for cosmological purposes.
Key words: methods: numerical / galaxies: clusters: general / large-scale structure of Universe
© The Authors 2025
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article is published in open access under the Subscribe to Open model. Subscribe to A&A to support open access publication.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.