High angular resolution Sunyaev-Zel'dovich observations of MACS J1423.8+2404 with NIKA: Multiwavelength analysis

Abstract

The prototype of the NIKA2 camera, NIKA, is a dual-band instrument operating at the IRAM 30-m telescope, which can observe the sky simultaneously at 150 and 260 GHz. One of the main goals of NIKA (and NIKA2) is to measure the pressure distribution in galaxy clusters at high angular resolution using the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect. Such observations have already proved to be an excellent probe of cluster pressure distributions even at intermediate and high redshifts. However, an important fraction of clusters host sub-millimeter and/or radio point sources, which can significantly affect the reconstructed signal. Here we report on <20 arcsec angular resolution observations at 150 and 260 GHz of the cluster MACS J1423.8+2404, which hosts both radio and sub-millimeter point sources. We examine the morphological distribution of the tSZ signal and compare it to other datasets. The NIKA data are combined with Herschel satellite data to study the spectral energy distribution (SED) of the sub-millimeter point source contaminants. We then perform a joint reconstruction of the intracluster medium (ICM) electronic pressure and density by combining NIKA, Planck, XMM-Newton, and Chandra data, focusing on the impact of the radio and sub-millimeter sources on the reconstructed pressureprofile. We find that large-scale pressure distribution is unaffected by the point sources because of the resolved nature of the NIKA observations. The reconstructed pressure in the inner region is slightly higher when the contribution of point sources are removed. We show that it is not possible to set strong constraints on the central pressure distribution without accurately removing these contaminants. The comparison with X-ray only data shows good agreement for the pressure, temperature, and entropy profiles, which all indicate that MACS J1423.8+2404 is a dynamically relaxed cool core system. The present observations illustrate the possibility of measuring these quantities with a relatively small integration time, even at high redshift and without X-ray spectroscopy. This work is part of a pilot study aiming at optimizing tSZ observations with the future NIKA2 camera.