Astronomy & Celestial Mechanics
the sky, computed
Concept

Surface brightness dimming — where it appears

The fall of an extended source's brightness per unit solid angle as the fourth power of one plus the redshift. It makes distant galaxies and cluster gas very hard to see, and the Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect escapes it because it is measured as a fraction of a background dimmed by the same factor.

Named by 3 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Gas outweighs stars 6:1, and the baryons come to 15%. Above: enclosed mass against radius for a 7-keV cluster with a beta-model gas profile, β = 0.65 and a 250-kpc core. The total is from hydrostatic equilibrium — the same equation that holds up a star, with the mass following from the density and temperature gradients and from nothing else — and comes to 9.98·10¹⁴ solar masses inside 2 megaparsecs. The gas, integrated from the same profile, is 1.6·10¹⁴; the stars in all the galaxies are 2.5·10¹³, 6 times less. Most of a cluster's ordinary matter is not in anything anybody would call an object. The two total-mass curves differ by the 15 per cent hydrostatic bias: some of the pressure holding the gas up is turbulence left from the last merger rather than heat, and a mass computed from the thermal pressure alone is low by about that — the assumption that makes the measurement possible is the one that biases it. With the correction, the baryons come to 15 per cent of the total, against the 15.7 per cent the microwave background gives for the universe as a whole. A cluster is large enough to have kept everything it started with, so its own accounting is a cosmological measurement. Below: the same gas seen two ways. X-ray surface brightness falls as (1+z)⁻⁴, so a cluster at redshift one is 16 times fainter per unit sky than the same cluster nearby; the Sunyaev–Zel'dovich distortion of the microwave background does not fall at all, because it is a fraction of a background whose own brightness rises by exactly the same factor. That is why a millimetre survey finds clusters at any distance and an X-ray survey finds the near ones.

The baryons that are not in the galaxies

The stars in a cluster are about a seventh of its ordinary matter. The rest is ten-million-kelvin gas that is invisible optically and dominant in X-rays — and weighing it with hydrostatic equilibrium biases the answer low by exactly the amount the assumption is wrong by.

galaxies · Clusters Four distances to the same galaxy. Four quantities all called "the distance", against redshift, at a Hubble constant of 67.36 km/s/Mpc, a matter density parameter of 0.3153 and a dark-energy parameter of 0.6847. They agree below z ≈ 0.1 and then part company completely. Comoving distance is the separation now, and it is what a map of the universe is drawn in. Luminosity distance is what a brightness gives, and it is larger by (1+z) because the photons arrive both redshifted and spread out in time. Light-travel distance is the age difference times c, and it is bounded by the age of the universe. Angular-diameter distance is what an angle gives, and it is the odd one: it rises, turns over at z = 1.59 where it reaches 1.79 Gpc, and falls thereafter. Past that redshift a galaxy of fixed size looks bigger the further away it is, because the universe it is being seen across was smaller when the light left it. At z = 10 the four differ by a factor of 121 between the largest and the smallest, so a sentence quoting a cosmological distance without saying which one has not given a number.

Four distances to the same galaxy

Inside the Local Group the word "distance" has one meaning. Past a redshift of about a tenth it has four, they disagree by factors of a hundred by the time the light is old, and one of them stops increasing and starts coming back.

cosmology · Distance ladder One cluster moved to z = 1.8: one signal unchanged, the other 57 times fainter. The same cluster of galaxies placed at a series of redshifts, with two ways of detecting it compared. The Sunyaev–Zel'dovich decrement is flat, because it is a fraction of the microwave background and the microwave background has the same surface brightness at every redshift a cluster can sit at — moving the cluster further away shrinks it on the sky but does not make its shadow shallower. The X-ray surface brightness of the identical object falls as (1+z)⁻⁴, the dimming every surface brightness suffers in an expanding universe, and by z = 1.8 it is 57 times below where it started. This is why the cluster surveys that reach the early universe are millimetre surveys: an X-ray telescope's cluster catalogue thins out with distance and a Sunyaev–Zel'dovich catalogue is limited only by how large the cluster looks and by how faint a fractional distortion the instrument can measure. What the effect cannot supply on its own is a distance — the signal that does not know how far away the cluster is also cannot say — so every one of these clusters still needs a redshift measured the ordinary way, from a spectrum of a galaxy inside it.

A shadow that does not get fainter with distance

Every other way of finding a cluster of galaxies gets harder the further away the cluster is. One does not. A cluster's hot gas scatters about one microwave background photon in a hundred to a higher frequency, and because the result is a fraction of a background rather than a flux from a source, the same cluster is exactly as detectable at ten billion light years as at one.

cosmology · Sunyaev zeldovich

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Angular-diameter distanceCluster mass functionIntracluster mediumThe Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effectBaryon fractionBeta modelBremsstrahlungComoving distanceCompton y parameterCooling flowCosmic microwave backgroundCosmological distances

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