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 ∼8μK at
99% confidence level at 5o angular resolution. We place an upper limit on
the mean Comptonization parameter of y≤1.5×10−6 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