On the Presence of Thermal SZ Induced Signal in the First Year WMAP Temperature Maps

Using available optical and X-ray catalogues of clusters and superclusters of galaxies, we build templates of tSZ emission as they should be detected by the WMAP experiment. We compute the cross-correlation of our templates with WMAP temperature maps, and interpret our results separately for clusters and for superclusters of galaxies. For clusters of galaxies, we claim 2-5 $\sigma$ detections in our templates built from BCS Ebeling et al. (1998), NORAS (Boehringer et al. 2000) and de Grandi et al. (1999) catalogues. In these templates, the typical cluster temperature decrements in WMAP maps are around 15-35 $\mu$K in the RJ range (no beam deconvolution applied). Several tests probing the possible influence of foregrounds in our analyses demonstrate that our results are robust against galactic contamination. On supercluster scales, we detect a diffuse component in the V & W WMAP bands which cannot be generated by superclusters in our catalogues (Einasto et al. 1994, 1997), and which is not present in the clean map of Tegmark, de Oliveira-Costa & Hamilton (2003). Using this clean map, our analyses yield, for Einasto's supercluster catalogues, the following upper limit for the comptonization parameter associated to supercluster scales: y_{SC} < 2.18 \time s 10^{-8} at the 95% confidence limit.Comment: MNRAS accepted. New section and minor changes include

Limits on Hot Intracluster Gas Contributions to the Tenerife Temperature Anisotropy Map

We limit the contribution of the hot intracluster gas, by means of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, to the temperature anisotropies measured by the Tenerife experiment. The data is cross-correlated with maps generated from the ACO cluster catalogue, the ROSAT PSPC catalogue of clusters of galaxies, a catalogue of superclusters and the HEAO 1 A-1 map of X-ray sources. There is no evidence of contamination by such sources at an rms level of $\sim 8\mu$K at 99% confidence level at $5^o$ angular resolution. We place an upper limit on the mean Comptonization parameter of $y \le 1.5\times 10^{-6}$ at the same level of confidence. These limits are slightly more restrictive than those previously found by a similar analysis on the COBE/DMR data and indicate that most of the signal measured by Tenerife is cosmological.Comment: To be published in ApJ (main journal