Constraining the Baryon Fraction in the Warm Hot Intergalactic Medium at Low Redshifts with Planck Data

Génova-Santos, R.; Atrio-Barandela, F.; Kitaura, F.-S.; Mücket, J. P.
Bibliographical reference

The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 806, Issue 1, article id. 113, 10 pp. (2015).

Advertised on:
6
2015
Number of authors
4
IAC number of authors
1
Citations
13
Refereed citations
12
Description
We cross-correlate foreground cleaned Planck Nominal cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps with two templates constructed from the Two-Micron All-Sky Redshift Survey of galaxies. The first template traces the large-scale filamentary distribution characteristic of the Warm–Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM) out to ∼ 90 {{h}-1} Mpc. The second preferentially traces the virialized gas in unresolved halos around galaxies. We find a marginal signal from the correlation of Planck data and the WHIM template with a signal to noise from 0.84 to 1.39 at the different Planck frequencies, and with a frequency dependence compatible with the thermal Sunyaev–Zel’dovich effect. When we restrict our analysis to the 60% of the sky outside the plane of the Galaxy and known point sources and galaxy clusters, the cross-correlation at zero lag is 0.064+/- 0.051 μ K. The correlation extends out to ≈ 6{}^\circ , which at the median depth of our template corresponds to a physical length of ∼ 6--8 {{h}-1} Mpc. On the same fraction of the sky, the cross-correlation of the CMB data with the second template is \lt 0.17 μ K (95% C.L.), providing no statistically significant evidence of a contribution from bound gas to the previous result. This limit translates into a physical constraint on the properties of the shock-heated WHIM of a log-normal model describing the weakly nonlinear density field. We find that our upper limit is compatible with a fraction of 45% of all baryons residing in filaments at overdensities ∼1–100 and with temperatures in the range {{10}4.5}--{{10}7.5} K, in agreement with the detection at redshift z∼ 0.5 of Van Waerbeke et al..
Related projects
Full-sky map showing the spatial distribution of the primary anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (generated 380,000 years after the Big Bang) derived from observations of the Planck satellite
Anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background
The general goal of this project is to determine and characterize the spatial and spectral variations in the temperature and polarisation of the Cosmic Microwave Background in angular scales from several arcminutes to several degrees. The primordial matter density fluctuations which originated the structure in the matter distribution of the present
Rafael
Rebolo López
 The Invisible Scaffolding of Space
Cosmology with Large Scale Structure Probes
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) contains the statistical information about the early seeds of the structure formation in our Universe. Its natural counterpart in the local universe is the distribution of galaxies that arises as a result of gravitational growth of those primordial and small density fluctuations. The characterization of the
FRANCISCO SHU
KITAURA JOYANES