Improved Constraints on Mergers with SZ, Hydrodynamical simulations, Optical, and X-ray (ICM-SHOX)

Paper II: Galaxy cluster sample overview

¹ Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
² Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
³ Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica, y Electrónica (INAOE), Aptdo. Postal 51 y 216, 7200, Puebla, Mexico
⁴ European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 2, D-85748, Garching, Germany
⁵ Physics Department, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA
⁶ Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología-Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica, y Electrónica (CONACyT-INAOE), Luis Enrique Erro 1, 72840 Puebla, Mexico
⁷ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA
⁸ University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA
⁹ Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY 14623, USA
¹⁰ Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O. Box 653, Be’er-Sheva 8410501, Israel

^* e-mail: esilich@caltech.edu

Published online: 28 March 2024

Abstract

Galaxy cluster mergers are representative of a wide range of physics, making them an excellent probe of the properties of dark matter and the ionized plasma of the intracluster medium. To date, most studies have focused on mergers occurring in the plane of the sky, where morphological features can be readily identified. To allow study of mergers with arbitrary orientation, we have assembled multi-probe data for the eight-cluster ICM-SHOX sample sensitive to both morphology and line of sight velocity. The first ICM-SHOX paper [1] provided an overview of our methodology applied to one member of the sample, MACS J0018.5+1626, in order to constrain its merger geometry. That work resulted in an exciting new discovery of a velocity space decoupling of its gas and dark matter distributions. In this work, we describe the availability and quality of multi-probe data for the full ICM-SHOX galaxy cluster sample. These datasets will form the observational basis of an upcoming full ICM-SHOX galaxy cluster sample analysis.