arXiv subjects

Eli S. Rykoff

Publications and source records attributed to Eli S. Rykoff.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Core or cusps: The central dark matter profile of a redshift one strong lensing cluster with a bright central image

We report on SPT-CLJ2011-5228, a giant system of arcs created by a cluster at $z=1.06$. The arc system is notable for the presence of a bright central image. The source is a Lyman Break galaxy at $z_s=2.39$ and the mass enclosed within the 14 arc second radius Einstein ring is $10^{14.2}$ solar masses. We perform a full light profile reconstruction of the lensed images to precisely infer the parameters of the mass distribution. The brightness of the central image demands that the central total density profile of the lens be shallow. By fitting the dark matter as a generalized Navarro-Frenk-White profile---with a free parameter for the inner density slope---we find that the break radius is $270^{+48}_{-76}$ kpc, and that the inner density falls with radius to the power $-0.38\pm0.04$ at 68 percent confidence. Such a shallow profile is in strong tension with our understanding of relaxed cold dark matter halos; dark matter only simulations predict the inner density should fall as $r^{-1}$. The tension can be alleviated if this cluster is in fact a merger; a two halo model can also reconstruct the data, with both clumps (density going as $r^{-0.8}$ and $r^{-1.0}$) much more consistent with predictions from dark matter only simulations. At the resolution of our Dark Energy Survey imaging, we are unable to choose between these two models, but we make predictions for forthcoming Hubble Space Telescope imaging that will decisively distinguish between them.

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arXiv2016

Evidence of Halo Assembly Bias in Massive Clusters

We present significant evidence of halo assembly bias for SDSS redMaPPer galaxy clusters in the redshift range $[0.1, 0.33]$. By dividing the 8,648 clusters into two subsamples based on the average member galaxy separation from the cluster center, we first show that the two subsamples have very similar halo mass of $M_{\rm 200m}\simeq 1.9\times 10^{14}~h^{-1}M_\odot$ based on the weak lensing signals at small radii $R<\sim 10~h^{-1}{\rm Mpc}$. However, their halo bias inferred from both the large-scale weak lensing and the projected auto-correlation functions differs by a factor of $\sim$1.5, which is a signature of assembly bias. The same bias hypothesis for the two subsamples is excluded at 2.5$σ$ in the weak lensing and 4.4$σ$ in the auto-correlation data, respectively. This result could bring a significant impact on both galaxy evolution and precision cosmology.

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arXiv2016

Detection of the Splashback Radius and Halo Assembly bias of Massive Galaxy Clusters

We show that the projected number density profiles of SDSS photometric galaxies around galaxy clusters displays strong evidence for the splashback radius, a sharp halo edge corresponding to the location of the first orbital apocenter of satellite galaxies after their infall. We split the clusters into two subsamples with different mean projected radial distances of their members, $\langle R_{\rm mem}\rangle$, at fixed richness and redshift, and show that the sample with smaller $\langle R_{\rm mem}\rangle$ has a smaller ratio of the splashback radius to the traditional halo boundary $R_{\rm 200m}$, than the subsample with larger $\langle R_{\rm mem}\rangle$, indicative of different mass accretion rates for the two subsamples. The same cluster samples were recently used by Miyatake et al. to show that their large-scale clustering differs despite their similar weak lensing masses, demonstrating strong evidence for halo assembly bias. We expand on this result by presenting a 6.6-$σ$ detection of halo assembly bias using the cluster-photometric galaxy cross-correlations. Our measured splashback radii are smaller, while the strength of the assembly bias signal is stronger, than expectations from N-body simulations based on the $Λ$-dominated, cold dark matter structure formation model. Dynamical friction or cluster-finding systematics such as miscentering or projection effects are not likely to be the sole source of these discrepancies.

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arXiv2016

Galaxy Cluster Mass Estimation from Stacked Spectroscopic Analysis

We use simulated galaxy surveys to study: i) how galaxy membership in redMaPPer clusters maps to the underlying halo population, and ii) the accuracy of a mean dynamical cluster mass, $M_σ(λ)$, derived from stacked pairwise spectroscopy of clusters with richness $λ$. Using $\sim\! 130,000$ galaxy pairs patterned after the SDSS redMaPPer cluster sample study of Rozo et al. (2015 RMIV), we show that the pairwise velocity PDF of central--satellite pairs with $m_i < 19$ in the simulation matches the form seen in RMIV. Through joint membership matching, we deconstruct the main Gaussian velocity component into its halo contributions, finding that the top-ranked halo contributes $\sim 60\%$ of the stacked signal. The halo mass scale inferred by applying the virial scaling of Evrard et al. (2008) to the velocity normalization matches, to within a few percent, the log-mean halo mass derived through galaxy membership matching. We apply this approach, along with mis-centering and galaxy velocity bias corrections, to estimate the log-mean matched halo mass at $z=0.2$ of SDSS redMaPPer clusters. Employing the velocity bias constraints of Guo et al. (2015), we find $\langle \ln(M_{200c})|λ\rangle = \ln(M_{30}) + α_m \ln(λ/30)$ with $M_{30} = 1.56 \pm 0.35 \times 10^{14} M_\odot$ and $α_m = 1.31 \pm 0.06_{stat} \pm 0.13_{sys}$. Systematic uncertainty in the velocity bias of satellite galaxies overwhelmingly dominates the error budget.

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arXiv2014

redMaPPer IV: Photometric Membership Identification of Cluster Galaxies with 1% Precision

In order to study the galaxy population of galaxy clusters with photometric data one must be able to accurately discriminate between cluster members and non-members. The redMaPPer cluster finding algorithm treats this problem probabilistically. Here, we utilize SDSS and GAMA spectroscopic membership rates to validate the redMaPPer membership probability estimates for clusters with $z\in[0.1,0.3]$. We find small - but correctable - biases, sourced by three different systematics. The first two were expected a priori, namely blue cluster galaxies and correlated structure along the line of sight. The third systematic is new: the redMaPPer template fitting exhibits a non-trivial dependence on photometric noise, which biases the original redMaPPer probabilities when utilizing noisy data. After correcting for these effects, we find exquisite agreement ($\approx 1\%$) between the photometric probability estimates and the spectroscopic membership rates, demonstrating that we can robustly recover cluster membership estimates from photometric data alone. As a byproduct of our analysis we find that on average unavoidable projection effects from correlated structure contribute $\approx 6\%$ of the richness of a redMaPPer galaxy cluster. This work also marks the second public release of the SDSS redMaPPer cluster catalog.

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arXiv2014

The X-CLASS - redMaPPer galaxy cluster comparison: I. Identification procedures

We performed a detailed and, for a large part interactive, analysis of the matching output between the X-CLASS and redMaPPer cluster catalogues. The overlap between the two catalogues has been accurately determined and possible cluster positional errors were manually recovered. The final samples comprise 270 and 355 redMaPPer and X-CLASS clusters respectively. X-ray cluster matching rates were analysed as a function of optical richness. In a second step, the redMaPPer clusters were correlated with the entire X-ray catalogue, containing point and uncharacterised sources (down to a few 10^{-15} erg s^{-1} cm^{-2} in the [0.5-2] keV band). A stacking analysis was performed for the remaining undetected optical clusters. Main results show that neither of the wavebands misses any massive cluster (as coded by X-ray luminosity or optical richness). After correcting for obvious pipeline short-comings (about 10% of the cases both in optical and X-ray), ~50% of the redMaPPer (down to a richness of 20) are found to coincide with an X-CLASS cluster; when considering X-ray sources of any type, this fraction increases to ~ 80%; for the remaining objects, the stacking analysis finds a weak signal within 0.5 Mpc around the cluster optical centers. The fraction of clusters totally dominated by AGN-type emission appears to be of the order of a few percent. Conversely ~ 40% of the X-CLASS clusters are identified with a redMaPPer (down to a richness of 20) - part of the non-matches being due to the fact that the X-CLASS sample extends further out than redMaPPer (z<1 vs z<0.6); extending the correlation down to a richness of 5, raises the matching rate to ~ 65%.

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arXiv2014

redMaPPer III: A Detailed Comparison of the Planck 2013 and SDSS DR8 RedMaPPer Cluster Catalogs

We compare the Planck Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) cluster sample (PSZ1) to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) redMaPPer catalog, finding that all Planck clusters within the redMaPPer mask and within the redshift range probed by redMaPPer are contained in the redMaPPer cluster catalog. These common clusters define a tight scaling relation in the richness-SZ mass ($λ$--$M_{SZ}$) plane, with an intrinsic scatter in richness of $σ_{λ|M_{SZ}} = 0.266 \pm 0.017$. The corresponding intrinsic scatter in true cluster halo mass at fixed richness is $\approx 21\%$. The regularity of this scaling relation is used to identify failures in both the redMaPPer and Planck cluster catalogs. Of the 245 galaxy clusters in common, we identify three failures in redMaPPer and 36 failures in the PSZ1. Of these, at least 12 are due to clusters whose optical counterpart was correctly identified in the PSZ1, but where the quoted redshift for the optical counterpart in the external data base used in the PSZ1 was incorrect. The failure rates for redMaPPer and the PSZ1 are $1.2\%$ and $14.7\%$ respectively, or 9.8% in the PSZ1 after subtracting the external data base errors. We have further identified 5 PSZ1 sources that suffer from projection effects (multiple rich systems along the line-of-sight of the SZ detection) and 17 new high redshift ($z\gtrsim 0.6$) cluster candidates of varying degrees of confidence. Should all of the high-redshift cluster candidates identified here be confirmed, we will have tripled the number of high redshift Planck clusters in the SDSS region. Our results highlight the power of multi-wavelength observations to identify and characterize systematic errors in galaxy cluster data sets, and clearly establish photometric data both as a robust cluster finding method, and as an important part of defining clean galaxy cluster samples.

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arXiv2013

redMaPPer II: X-ray and SZ Performance Benchmarks for the SDSS Catalog

We evaluate the performance of the SDSS DR8 redMaPPer photometric cluster catalog by comparing it to overlapping X-ray and SZ selected catalogs from the literature. We confirm the redMaPPer photometric redshifts are nearly unbiased (<Δz> < 0.005), have low scatter (σ_z ~ 0.006-0.02, depending on redshift), and have a low catastrophic failure rate (~ 1%). Both the T_X-λ and Mgas-λ scaling relations are consistent with a mass scatter of σ_{\ln M|λ} ~ 25%, albeit with a ~ 1% outlier rate due to projection effects. This failure rate is somewhat lower than that expected for the full cluster sample, but is consistent with the additional selection effects introduced by our reliance on X-ray and SZ selected reference cluster samples. Where the redMaPPer DR8 catalog is volume limited (z < 0.35), the catalog is 100% complete above T_X > 3.5 keV, and L_X > 2\times 10^{44} erg/s, decreasing to 90% completeness at L_X ~ 10^{43} erg/s. All rich (λ> 100), low redshift (z < 0.25) redMaPPer clusters are X-ray detected in the ROSAT All Sky Survey (RASS), and 86% of the clusters are correctly centered. Compared to other SDSS photometric cluster catalogs, redMaPPer has the highest completeness and purity, and the best photometric redshift performance, though some algorithms do achieve comparable performance to redMaPPer in subsets of the above categories and/or in limited redshift ranges. The redMaPPer richness is clearly the one that best correlates with X-ray temperature and gas mass. Most algorithms (including redMaPPer) have very similar centering performance, with only one exception which performs worse.

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arXiv2013

Cluster Cosmology at a Crossroads: Neutrino Masses

Galaxy clusters --- in combination with CMB and BAO data --- can provide precise constraints on the sum of neutrino masses. However, these constraints depend on the calibration of the mass--observable relation. For instance, the mass calibration employed in Planck Collaboration (2011a,b) rules out the minimal 6-parameter ΛCDM model at 3.7σ, and implies a sum of neutrino masses \sum m_ν= 0.39 \pm 0.10. By contrast, the mass calibration favored by Rozo et al. (2012b) from a self-consistent analysis of X-ray, SZ, and optical scaling relations is consistent with a minimal flat ΛCDM model with no massive neutrinos (1.7σ), and is a better fit to additional data (e.g. H0). We discuss these results in light of the recent SPT and ACT analysis, noting that the Rozo et al. (2012b) model suggests the current mild "tension" (<2σ) between CMB and BAO+H_0 data will decrease as the uncertainties in these measurements decrease.

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arXiv2012

Spatial Anisotropy of Galaxy Kinematics in Sloan Digital Sky Survey Galaxy Clusters

Measurements of galaxy cluster kinematics are important in understanding the dynamical state and evolution of clusters of galaxies, as well as constraining cosmological models. While it is well established that clusters exhibit non-spherical geometries, evident in the distribution of galaxies on the sky, azimuthal variations of galaxy kinematics within clusters have yet to be observed. Here we measure the azimuthal dependence of the line-of-sight velocity dispersion profile in a stacked sample of 1743 galaxy clusters from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The clusters are drawn from the SDSS DR8 redMaPPer catalog. We find that the line-of-sight velocity dispersion of galaxies lying along the major axis of the central galaxy is larger than those that lie along the minor axis. This is the first observational detection of anisotropic kinematics of galaxies in clusters. We show that the result is consistent with predictions from numerical simulations. Furthermore we find that the degree of projected anisotropy is strongly dependent on the line-of-sight orientation of the galaxy cluster, opening new possibilities for assessing systematics in optical cluster finding.

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arXiv2012

Galaxies in X-ray Groups. II. A Weak Lensing Study of Halo Centering

Locating the centers of dark matter halos is critical for understanding the mass profiles of halos as well as the formation and evolution of the massive galaxies that they host. The task is observationally challenging because we cannot observe halos directly, and tracers such as bright galaxies or X-ray emission from hot plasma are imperfect. In this paper we quantify the consequences of miscentering on the weak lensing signal from a sample of 129 X-ray selected galaxy groups in the COSMOS field with redshifts 0<z<1 and halo masses in the range 10^13 - 10^14 M_sun. By measuring the stacked lensing signal around eight different candidate centers (such as the brightest member galaxy, the mean position of all member galaxies, or the X-ray centroid), we determine which candidates best trace the center of mass in halos. In this sample of groups, we find that massive galaxies near the X-ray centroids trace the center of mass to <~75 kpc, while the X-ray position and centroids based on the mean position of member galaxies have larger offsets primarily due to the statistical uncertainties in their positions (typically ~50-150 kpc). Approximately 30% of groups in our sample have ambiguous centers with multiple bright or massive galaxies, and these groups show disturbed mass profiles that are not well fit by standard models, suggesting that they are merging systems. We find that halo mass estimates from stacked weak lensing can be biased low by 5-30% if inaccurate centers are used and the issue of miscentering is not addressed.

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arXiv2012

A Comparative Study of Local Galaxy Clusters: II: X-ray and SZ Scaling Relations

We compare cluster scaling relations published for three different samples selected via X-ray and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) signatures. We find tensions driven mainly by two factors: i) systematic differences in the X-ray cluster observables used to derive the scaling relations, and ii) uncertainty in the modeling of how the gas mass of galaxy clusters scales with total mass. All scaling relations are in agreement after accounting for these two effects. We describe a multivariate scaling model that enables a fully self-consistent treatment of multiple observational catalogs in the presence of property covariance, and apply this formalism when interpreting published results. The corrections due to scatter and observable covariance can be significant. For instance, our predicted Ysz-Lx scaling relation differs from that derived using the naive "plug in" method by \approx 25%. Finally, we test the mass normalization for each of the X-ray data sets we consider by applying a space density consistency test: we compare the observed REFLEX luminosity function to expectations from published Lx-M relations convolved with the mass function for a WMAP7 flat ΛCDM model.

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arXiv2012

Closing the Loop: A Self-Consistent Model of Optical, X-ray, and SZ Scaling Relations for Clusters of Galaxies

We demonstrate that optical data from SDSS, X-ray data from ROSAT and Chandra, and SZ data from Planck, can be modeled in a fully self-consistent manner. After accounting for systematic errors and allowing for property covariance, we find that scaling relations derived from optical and X-ray selected cluster samples are consistent with one another. Moreover, these clusters scaling relations satisfy several non-trivial spatial abundance constraints and closure relations. Given the good agreement between optical and X-ray samples, we combine the two and derive a joint set of LX-M and YSZ-M relations. Our best fit YSZ-M relation is in good agreement with the observed amplitude of the thermal SZ power spectrum for a WMAP7 cosmology, and is consistent with the masses for the two CLASH galaxy clusters published thus far. We predict the halo masses of the remaining z \leq 0.4 CLASH clusters, and use our scaling relations to compare our results with a variety of X-ray and weak lensing cluster masses from the literature.

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arXiv2012

A Comparative Study of Local Galaxy Clusters: I. Derived X-ray Observables

We examine systematic differences in the derived X-ray properties of galaxy clusters as reported by three different groups: Vikhlinin et al. (2009a), Mantz et al. (2010b), and Planck Collaboration (2011b). The sample overlap between any two pairs of works ranges between 16 to 28 galaxy clusters in common. We find systematic differences in most reported properties, including the total cluster mass, M500. The most extreme case is an average 45% \pm 5% difference in cluster mass between the Planck Collaboration (2011b) and Mantz et al. (2010b), for clusters at z > 0.13 (averaged over 16 clusters). These mass differences induce differences in cluster observables defined within an R500 aperture. After accounting for aperture differences, we find very good agreement in gas mass estimates between the different groups. However, the soft-band X-ray luminosity, LX, core-excised spectroscopic temperature, TX, and gas thermal energy, YX = MgasTX display mean differences at the 5%-15% level. We also find that the low (z \leq 0.13) and high (z \geq 0.13) galaxy cluster samples in Planck Collaboration (2011b) appear to be systematically different: the YSZ/YX ratio for these two sub- samples is ln(YSZ/YX) = -0.06 \pm 0.04 and ln(YSZ/YX) = 0.08 \pm 0.04 for the low and high redshift sub-samples respectively.

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arXiv2010

A GMBCG Galaxy Cluster Catalog of 55,424 Rich Clusters from SDSS DR7

We present a large catalog of optically selected galaxy clusters from the application of a new Gaussian Mixture Brightest Cluster Galaxy (GMBCG) algorithm to SDSS Data Release 7 data. The algorithm detects clusters by identifying the red sequence plus Brightest Cluster Galaxy (BCG) feature, which is unique for galaxy clusters and does not exist among field galaxies. Red sequence clustering in color space is detected using an Error Corrected Gaussian Mixture Model. We run GMBCG on 8240 square degrees of photometric data from SDSS DR7 to assemble the largest ever optical galaxy cluster catalog, consisting of over 55,000 rich clusters across the redshift range from 0.1 < z < 0.55. We present Monte Carlo tests of completeness and purity and perform cross-matching with X-ray clusters and with the maxBCG sample at low redshift. These tests indicate high completeness and purity across the full redshift range for clusters with 15 or more members.

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arXiv2010

Precision Measurements of the Cluster Red Sequence using an Error Corrected Gaussian Mixture Model

The red sequence is an important feature of galaxy clusters and plays a crucial role in optical cluster detection. Measurement of the slope and scatter of the red sequence are affected both by selection of red sequence galaxies and measurement errors. In this paper, we describe a new error corrected Gaussian Mixture Model for red sequence galaxy identification. Using this technique, we can remove the effects of measurement error and extract unbiased information about the intrinsic properties of the red sequence. We use this method to select red sequence galaxies in each of the 13,823 clusters in the maxBCG catalog, and measure the red sequence ridgeline location and scatter of each. These measurements provide precise constraints on the variation of the average red galaxy populations in the observed frame with redshift. We find that the scatter of the red sequence ridgeline increases mildly with redshift, and that the slope decreases with redshift. We also observe that the slope does not strongly depend on cluster richness. Using similar methods, we show that this behavior is mirrored in a spectroscopic sample of field galaxies, further emphasizing that ridgeline properties are independent of environment.

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arXiv2009

Cosmological Constraints from the SDSS maxBCG Cluster Catalog

We use the abundance and weak lensing mass measurements of the SDSS maxBCG cluster catalog to simultaneously constrain cosmology and the richness--mass relation of the clusters. Assuming a flat \LambdaCDM cosmology, we find σ_8(Ω_m/0.25)^{0.41} = 0.832\pm 0.033 after marginalization over all systematics. In common with previous studies, our error budget is dominated by systematic uncertainties, the primary two being the absolute mass scale of the weak lensing masses of the maxBCG clusters, and uncertainty in the scatter of the richness--mass relation. Our constraints are fully consistent with the WMAP five-year data, and in a joint analysis we find σ_8=0.807\pm 0.020 and Ω_m=0.265\pm 0.016, an improvement of nearly a factor of two relative to WMAP5 alone. Our results are also in excellent agreement with and comparable in precision to the latest cosmological constraints from X-ray cluster abundances. The remarkable consistency among these results demonstrates that cluster abundance constraints are not only tight but also robust, and highlight the power of optically-selected cluster samples to produce precision constraints on cosmological parameters.

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arXiv2008

An Improved Cluster Richness Estimator

Minimizing the scatter between cluster mass and accessible observables is an important goal for cluster cosmology. In this work, we introduce a new matched filter richness estimator, and test its performance using the maxBCG cluster catalog. Our new estimator significantly reduces the variance in the L_X-richness relation, from σ_{\ln L_X}^2=(0.86\pm0.02)^2 to σ_{\ln L_X}^2=(0.69\pm0.02)^2. Relative to the maxBCG richness estimate, it also removes the strong redshift dependence of the richness scaling relations, and is significantly more robust to photometric and redshift errors. These improvements are largely due to our more sophisticated treatment of galaxy color data. We also demonstrate the scatter in the L_X-richness relation depends on the aperture used to estimate cluster richness, and introduce a novel approach for optimizing said aperture which can be easily generalized to other mass tracers.

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