Detection of the pairwise kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect with BOSS DR11 and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope

Understand

We present a new measurement of the kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect using data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS).

• Using 600 square degrees of overlapping sky area, we evaluate the mean pairwise baryon momentum associated with the positions of 50,000 bright galaxies in the BOSS DR11 Large Scale Structure catalog.
• A non-zero signal arises from the large-scale motions of halos containing the sample galaxies.
• The data fits an analytical signal model well, with the optical depth to microwave photon scattering as a free parameter determining the overall signal amplitude.