604 research outputs found

    Detection of X-ray galaxy clusters based on the Kolmogorov method

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    The detection of clusters of galaxies in large surveys plays an important part in extragalactic astronomy, and particularly in cosmology, since cluster counts can give strong constraints on cosmological parameters. X-ray imaging is in particular a reliable means to discover new clusters, and large X-ray surveys are now available. Considering XMM-Newton data for a sample of 40 Abell clusters, we show that their analysis with a Kolmogorov distribution can provide a distinctive signature for galaxy clusters. The Kolmogorov method is sensitive to the correlations in the cluster X-ray properties and can therefore be used for their identification, thus allowing to search reliably for clusters in a simple way

    Planck early results. II. The thermal performance of Planck

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    The performance of the Planck instruments in space is enabled by their low operating temperatures, 20 K for LFI and 0.1 K for HFI, achieved through a combination of passive radiative cooling and three active mechanical coolers. The scientific requirement for very broad frequency coverage led to two detector technologies with widely different temperature and cooling needs. Active coolers could satisfy these needs; a helium cryostat, as used by previous cryogenic space missions (IRAS, COBE, ISO, Spitzer, AKARI), could not. Radiative cooling is provided by three V-groove radiators and a large telescope baffle. The active coolers are a hydrogen sorption cooler (<20 K), a 4He Joule-Thomson cooler (4.7 K), and a 3He-4He dilution cooler (1.4 K and 0.1 K). The flight system was at ambient temperature at launch and cooled in space to operating conditions. The HFI bolometer plate reached 93 mK on 3 July 2009, 50 days after launch. The solar panel always faces the Sun, shadowing the rest of Planck, and operates at a mean temperature of 384 K. At the other end of the spacecraft, the telescope baffle operates at 42.3 K and the telescope primary mirror operates at 35.9 K. The temperatures of key parts of the instruments are stabilized by both active and passive methods. Temperature fluctuations are driven by changes in the distance from the Sun, sorption cooler cycling and fluctuations in gas-liquid flow, and fluctuations in cosmic ray flux on the dilution and bolometer plates. These fluctuations do not compromise the science data.Planck is too large a project to allow full acknowledgement of all contributions by individuals, institutions, industries, and funding agencies. The main entities involved in the mission operations are as follows. The European Space Agency operates the satellite via its Mission Operations Centre located at ESOC (Darmstadt, Germany) and coordinates scientific operations via the Planck Science Office located at ESAC (Madrid, Spain). Two Consortia, comprising around 50 scientific institutes within Europe, the USA, and Canada, and funded by agencies from the participating countries, developed the scientific instruments LFI and HFI, and continue to operate them via Instrument Operations Teams located in Trieste (Italy) and Orsay (France). The Consortia are also responsible for scientific processing of the acquired data. The Consortia are led by the Principal Investigators: J.-L. Puget in France for HFI (funded principally by CNES and CNRS/INSU-IN2P3) and N. Mandolesi in Italy for LFI (funded principally via ASI). NASA’s US Planck Project, based at JPL and involving scientists at many US institutions, contributes significantly to the efforts of these two Consortia. A description of the Planck Collaboration and a list of its members, indicating which technical or scientific activities they have been involved in, can be found at (http://www.rssd.esa.int/index.php?project=PLANCK&page=Planck_Collaboration). The Planck Collaboration acknowledges the support of: ESA; CNES and CNRS/INSU-IN2P3-INP (France); ASI, CNR, and INAF (Italy); NASA and DoE (USA); STFC and UKSA (UK); CSIC, MICINN and JA (Spain); Tekes, AoF and CSC (Finland); DLR and MPG (Germany); CSA (Canada); DTU Space (Denmark); SER/SSO (Switzerland); RCN (Norway); SFI (Ireland); FCT/MCTES (Portugal); and DEISA (EU). We acknowledge the use of thermal models from Thales for the payload, IAS for the HFI, JPL for the sorption cooler, and Laben for the LFI. Some of the results in this paper have been derived using the HEALPix package (Górski et al. 2005). The HFI team wishes to thank warmly the Herschel-Planck project team under the leadership of Thomas Passvogel for their time, effort, and competence in solving the crises following failures of several parts of the cyrochain during Planck system tests. We acknowledge very useful discussions on the thermal behaviour of Planck during the system tests from the CSL team, who went far beyond their formal responsibilities

    Planck early results. IX. XMM-Newton follow-up for validation of Planck cluster candidates

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    We present the XMM-Newton follow-up for confirmation of Planck cluster candidates. Twenty-five candidates have been observed to date using snapshot (~10ks) exposures, ten as part of a pilot programme to sample a low range of signal-to-noise ratios (4 5 candidates. The sensitivity and spatial resolution of XMM-Newton allows unambiguous discrimination between clusters and false candidates. The 4 false candidates have S/N ? 4.1. A total of 21 candidates are confirmed as extended X-ray sources. Seventeen are single clusters, the majority of which are found to have highly irregular and disturbed morphologies (about ~70%). The remaining four sources are multiple systems, including the unexpected discovery of a supercluster at z = 0.45. For 20 sources we are able to derive a redshift estimate from the X-ray Fe K line (albeit of variable quality). The new clusters span the redshift range 0.09 ? z ? 0.54, with a median redshift of z ~ 0.37. A first determination is made of their X-ray properties including the characteristic size, which is used to improve the estimate of the SZ Compton parameter, Y500. The follow-up validation programme has helped to optimise the Planck candidate selection process. It has also provided a preview of the X-ray properties of these newly-discovered clusters, allowing comparison with their SZ properties, and to the X-ray and SZ properties of known clusters observed in the Planck survey. Our results suggest that Planck may have started to reveal a non-negligible population of massive dynamically perturbed objects that is under-represented in X-ray surveys. However, despite their particular properties, these new clusters appear to follow the Y500?YX relation established for X-ray selected objects, where YX is the product of the gas mass and temperature.The Planck Collaboration thanks Norbert Schartel for his support to the validation process and granting discretionary time for the observation of Planck cluster candidates. The present work is based: on observations obtained with XMM-Newton, an ESA science mission with instruments and contributions directly funded by ESA Member States and the USA (NASA); and on observations made with the IAC80 telescope operated on the island of Tenerife by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in the Spanish Observatorio del Teide. This research has made use of the following databases: SIMBAD, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France; the NED database, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; BAX, which is operated by the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Tarbes-Toulouse (LATT), under contract with the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES); and the SZ repository operated by IAS Data and Operation Center (IDOC) under contract with CNES. A description of the Planck Collaboration and a list of its members, indicating which technical or scientific activities they have been involved in, can be found at http://www.rssd.esa.int/Planck_Collaboration. The Planck Collaboration acknowledges the support of: ESA; CNES and CNRS/INSU-IN2P3-INP (France); ASI, CNR, and INAF (Italy); NASA and DoE (USA); STFC and UKSA (UK); CSIC, MICINN and JA (Spain); Tekes, AoF and CSC (Finland); DLR and MPG (Germany); CSA (Canada); DTU Space (Denmark); SER/SSO (Switzerland); RCN (Norway); SFI (Ireland); FCT/MCTES (Portugal); and DEISA (EU)

    Planck early results. XII. Cluster Sunyaev-Zeldovich optical scaling relations

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    We present the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) signal-to-richness scaling relation (Y500 ? N200) for the MaxBCG cluster catalogue. Employing a multifrequency matched filter on the Planck sky maps, we measure the SZ signal for each cluster by adapting the filter according to weak-lensing calibrated mass-richness relations (N200 ? M500). We bin our individual measurements and detect the SZ signal down to the lowest richness systems (N200 = 10) with high significance, achieving a detection of the SZ signal in systems with mass as low as M500 ? 5 × 1013 M . The observed Y500 ? N200 relation is well modeled by a power law over the full richness range. It has a lower normalisation at given N200 than predicted based on X-ray models and published mass-richness relations. An X-ray subsample, however, does conform to the predicted scaling, and model predictions do reproduce the relation between our measured bin-average SZ signal and measured bin-average X-ray luminosities. At fixed richness, we find an intrinsic dispersion in the Y500 ? N200 relation of 60% rising to of order 100% at low richness. Thanks to its all-sky coverage, Planck provides observations for more than 13 000 MaxBCG clusters and an unprecedented SZ/optical data set, extending the list of known cluster scaling laws to include SZ-optical properties. The data set offers essential clues for models of galaxy formation. Moreover, the lower normalisation of the SZ-mass relation implied by the observed SZ-richness scaling has important consequences for cluster physics and cosmological studies with SZ clusters.The authors from the consortia funded principally by CNES, CNRS, ASI, NASA, and Danish Natural Research Council acknowledge the use of the pipeline running infrastructures Magique3 at Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (France), CPAC at Cambridge (UK), and USPDC at IPAC (USA). We acknowledge the use of the HEALPix package (Górski et al. 2005). A description of the Planck Collaboration and a list of its members, indicating which technical or scientific activities they have been involved in, can be found at http://www.rssd.esa.int/Planck

    Planck early results. X. Statistical analysis of Sunyaev-Zeldovich scaling relations for X-ray galaxy clusters

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    All-sky data from the Planck survey and the Meta-Catalogue of X-ray detected Clusters of galaxies (MCXC) are combined to investigate the relationship between the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) signal and X-ray luminosity. The sample comprises ?1600 X-ray clusters with redshifts up to ?1 and spans a wide range in X-ray luminosity. The SZ signal is extracted for each object individually, and the statistical significance of the measurement is maximised by averaging the SZ signal in bins of X-ray luminosity, total mass, or redshift. The SZ signal is detected at very high significance over more than two decades in X-ray luminosity (1043 erg s?1 L500E(z)?7/3 2 × 1045 erg s?1). The relation between intrinsic SZ signal and X-ray luminosity is investigated and the measured SZ signal is compared to values predicted from X-ray data. Planck measurements and X-ray based predictions are found to be in excellent agreement over the whole explored luminosity range. No significant deviation from standard evolution of the scaling relations is detected. For the first time the intrinsic scatter in the scaling relation between SZ signal and X-ray luminosity is measured and found to be consistent with the one in the luminosity ? mass relation from X-ray studies. There is no evidence of any deficit in SZ signal strength in Planck data relative to expectations from the X-ray properties of clusters, underlining the robustness and consistency of our overall view of intra-cluster medium properties.This research has made use of the X-Rays Clusters Database (BAX) which is operated by the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Tarbes-Toulouse (LATT), under contract with the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES). We acknowledge the use of the HEALPix package (Górski et al. 2005). The Planck Collaboration acknowledges the support of: ESA; CNES and CNRS/INSU-IN2P3-INP (France); ASI, CNR, and INAF (Italy); NASA and DoE (USA); STFC and UKSA (UK); CSIC, MICINN and JA (Spain); Tekes, AoF and CSC (Finland); DLR and MPG (Germany); CSA (Canada); DTU Space (Denmark); SER/SSO (Switzerland); RCN (Norway); SFI (Ireland); FCT/MCTES (Portugal); and DEISA (EU). A description of the Planck Collaboration and a list of its members, indicating which technical or scientific activities they have been involved in, can be found at http://www.rssd.esa.int/Planck

    Planck early results. XIII. Statistical properties of extragalactic radio sources in the Planck Early Release Compact Source Catalogue

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    The data reported in Planck?s Early Release Compact Source Catalogue (ERCSC) are exploited to measure the number counts (dN/dS) of extragalactic radio sources at 30, 44, 70, 100, 143 and 217 GHz. Due to the full-sky nature of the catalogue, this measurement extends to the rarest and brightest sources in the sky. At lower frequencies (30, 44, and 70 GHz) our counts are in very good agreement with estimates based on WMAP data, being somewhat deeper at 30 and 70 GHz, and somewhat shallower at 44 GHz. Planck?s source counts at 143 and 217 GHz join smoothly with the fainter ones provided by the SPT and ACT surveys over small fractions of the sky. An analysis of source spectra, exploiting Planck?s uniquely broad spectral coverage, finds clear evidence of a steepening of the mean spectral index above about 70 GHz. This implies that, at these frequencies, the contamination of the CMB power spectrum by radio sources below the detection limit is significantly lower than previously estimated.The Planck Collaboration thanks the referee, Ronald Ekers, for his insightful comments, which helped improve the paper. This research has made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France. The Planck Collaboration acknowledges the support of: ESA; CNES and CNRS/INSU-IN2P3-INP (France); ASI, CNR, and INAF (Italy); NASA and DoE (USA); STFC and UKSA (UK); CSIC, MICINN and JA (Spain); Tekes, AoF and CSC (Finland); DLR and MPG (Germany); CSA (Canada); DTU Space (Denmark); SER/SSO (Switzerland); RCN (Norway); SFI (Ireland); FCT/MCTES (Portugal); and DEISA (EU). A description of the Planck Collaboration and a list of its members can be found at http://www.rssd.esa.int/index.php?project=PLANCK&page=Planck_Collaboratio

    Planck early results. XXI. Properties of the interstellar medium in the Galactic plane

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    Planck has observed the entire sky from 30 GHz to 857GHz. The observed foreground emission contains contributions from different phases of the interstellar medium (ISM). We have separated the observed Galactic emission into the different gaseous components (atomic, molecular and ionised) in each of a number of Galactocentric rings. This technique provides the necessary information to study dust properties (emissivity, temperature, etc.), as well as other emission mechanisms as a function of Galactic radius. Templates are created for various Galactocentric radii using velocity information from atomic (neutral hydrogen) and molecular (12CO) observations. The ionised template is assumed to be traced by free-free emission as observed by WMAP, while 408 MHz emission is used to trace the synchrotron component. Gas emission not traced by the above templates, namely ?dark gas?, as evidenced using Planck data, is included as an additional template, the first time such a component has been used in this way. These templates are then correlated with each of the Planck frequency bands, as well as with higher frequency data from IRAS and DIRBE along with radio data at 1.4 GHz. The emission per column density of the gas templates allows us to create distinct spectral energy distributions (SEDs) per Galactocentric ring and in each of the gaseous tracers from 1.4 GHz to 25 THz (12?m). The resulting SEDs allow us to explore the contribution of various emission mechanisms to the Planck signal. Apart from the thermal dust and free-free emission, we have probed the Galaxy for anomalous (e.g., spinning) dust as well as synchrotron emission. We find the dust opacity in the solar neighbourhood, ?/NH = 0.92 ± 0.05 × 10-25 cm2 at 250 ?m, with no significant variation with Galactic radius, even though the dust temperature is seen to vary from over 25 K to under 14 K. Furthermore, we show that anomalous dust emission is present in the atomic, molecular and dark gas phases throughout the Galactic disk. Anomalous emission is not clearly detected in the ionised phase, as free-free emission is seen to dominate. The derived dust propeties associated with the dark gas phase are derived but do not allow us to reveal the nature of this phase. For all environments, the anomalous emission is consistent with rotation from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and, according to our simple model, accounts for (25 ± 5)% (statistical) of the total emission at 30 GHz.A description of the Planck Collaboration and a list of its members can be found at http://www.rssd.esa.int/index.php?project=PLANCK&page=Planck_Collaboratio

    Planck early results. XXII. The submillimetre properties of a sample of Galactic cold clumps

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    We perform a detailed investigation of sources from the Cold Cores Catalogue of Planck Objects (C3PO). Our goal is to probe the reliability of the detections, validate the separation between warm and cold dust emission components, provide the first glimpse at the nature, internal morphology and physical characterictics of the Planck-detected sources. We focus on a sub-sample of ten sources from the C3PO list, selected to sample different environments, from high latitude cirrus to nearby (150pc) and remote (2kpc) molecular complexes. We present Planck surface brightness maps and derive the dust temperature, emissivity spectral index, and column densities of the fields. With the help of higher resolution Herschel and AKARI continuum observations and molecular line data, we investigate the morphology of the sources and the properties of the substructures at scales below the Planck beam size. The cold clumps detected by Planck are found to be located on large-scale filamentary (or cometary) structures that extend up to 20pc in the remote sources. The thickness of these filaments ranges between 0.3 and 3pc, for column densities NH2 ~ 0.1 to 1.6 × 1022 cm-2, and with linear mass density covering a broad range, between 15 and 400 M? pc-1. The dust temperatures are low (between 10 and 15K) and the Planck cold clumps correspond to local minima of the line-of-sight averaged dust temperature in these fields. These low temperatures are confirmed when AKARI and Herschel data are added to the spectral energy distributions. Herschel data reveal a wealth of substructure within the Planck cold clumps. In all cases (except two sources harbouring young stellar objects), the substructures are found to be colder, with temperatures as low as 7K. Molecular line observations provide gas column densities which are consistent with those inferred from the dust. The linewidths are all supra-thermal, providing large virial linear mass densities in the range 10 to 300 M? pc-1, comparable within factors of a few, to the gas linear mass densities. The analysis of this small set of cold clumps already probes a broad variety of structures in the C3PO sample, probably associated with different evolutionary stages, from cold and starless clumps, to young protostellar objects still embedded in their cold surrounding cloud. Because of the all-sky coverage and its sensitivity, Planck is able to detect and locate the coldest spots in massive elongated structures that may be the long-searched for progenitors of stellar clusters.A description of the Planck Collaboration and a list of its members can be found at http://www.rssd.esa.int/index.php?project=PLANCK&page=Planck_Collaboration. The Planck Collaboration acknowledges the support of: ESA; CNES and CNRS/INSU-IN2P3-INP (France); ASI, CNR, and INAF (Italy); NASA and DoE (USA); STFC and UKSA (UK); CSIC, MICINN and JA (Spain); Tekes, AoF and CSC (Finland); DLR and MPG (Germany); CSA (Canada); DTU Space (Denmark); SER/SSO (Switzerland); RCN (Norway); SFI (Ireland); FCT/MCTES (Portugal); and DEISA (EU) This publication makes use of data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation. This research has made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France. This research is based on observations with AKARI, a JAXA project with the participation of ESA

    Planck early results. XV. Spectral energy distributions and radio continuum spectra of northern extragalactic radio sources

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    Spectral energy distributions (SEDs) and radio continuum spectra are presented for a northern sample of 104 extragalactic radio sources, based on the Planck Early Release Compact Source Catalogue (ERCSC) and simultaneous multifrequency data. The nine Planck frequencies, from 30 to 857 GHz, are complemented by a set of simultaneous observations ranging from radio to gamma-rays. This is the first extensive frequency coverage in the radio and millimetre domains for an essentially complete sample of extragalactic radio sources, and it shows how the individual shocks, each in their own phase of development, shape the radio spectra as they move in the relativistic jet. The SEDs presented in this paper were fitted with second and third degree polynomials to estimate the frequencies of the synchrotron and inverse Compton (IC) peaks, and the spectral indices of low and high frequency radio data, including the Planck ERCSC data, were calculated. SED modelling methods are discussed, with an emphasis on proper, physical modelling of the synchrotron bump using multiple components. Planck ERCSC data also suggest that the original accelerated electron energy spectrum could be much harder than commonly thought, with power-law indexaround 1.5 instead of the canonical 2.5. The implications of this are discussed for the acceleration mechanisms effective in blazar shocks. Furthermore in many cases the Planck data indicate that gamma-ray emission must originate in the same shocks that produce the radio emission.The Planck Collaboration acknowledges the support of: ESA; CNES and CNRS/INSU-IN2P3-INP (France); ASI, CNR, and INAF (Italy); NASA and DoE (USA); STFC and UKSA (UK); CSIC, MICINN and JA (Spain); Tekes, AoF and CSC (Finland); DLR and MPG (Germany); CSA (Canada); DTU Space (Denmark); SER/SSO (Switzerland); RCN (Norway); SFI (Ireland); FCT/MCTES (Portugal); and DEISA (EU). A description of the Planck Collaboration and a list of its members, indicating which technical or scientific activities they have been involved in, can be found via http://www.rssd.esa.int/Planck. The MetsĂ€hovi and Tuorla observing projects are supported by the Academy of Finland (grant numbers 212656, 210338, 121148, 127740 and 122352). UMRAO is supported by a series of grants from the NSF and NASA, and by the University of Michigan. This publication is partly based on data acquired with the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX). APEX is a collaboration between the Max-Planck-Institut fĂŒr Radioastronomie, the European Southern Observatory, and the Onsala Space Observatory. This research is partly based on observations with the 100-m telescope of the MPIfR (Max-Planck-Institut fĂŒr Radioastronomie) at Effelsberg, the IRAM 30-m telescope, and the Medicina (Noto) telescope operated by INAF – Istituto di Radioastronomia. This paper makes use of observations obtained at the Very Large Array (VLA) which is an instrument of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). The NRAO is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. The observations at Xinglong station are supported by the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation grants 10633020, 10778714, and 11073032, and by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) No. 2007CB815403. The OVRO 40-m monitoring program is supported in part by NASA. The Australia Telescope is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO. The Fermi LAT Collaboration acknowledges generous ongoing support from a number of agencies and institutes that have supported both the development and the operation of the LAT as well as scientific data analysis. These include the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Energy in the United States, the Commissariat Ă  l’Energie Atomique and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/Institut National de Physique NuclĂ©aire et de Physique des Particules in France, the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana and the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Italy, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in Japan, and the K. A. Wallenberg Foundation, the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish National Space Board in Sweden. Additional support for science analysis during the operations phase is gratefully acknowledged from the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy and the Centre National d’Études Spatiales in France. Part of this work is based on archival data, software or on-line services provided by the ASI Science Data Center ASDC. We thank the Fermi LAT team reviewers, S. Ciprini and M. Giroletti, for their effort and valuable comments
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