How Cluster Pressure Profiles Scale: Mass, Redshift, and Intrinsic Scatter
Abstract
[shortened] The thermal pressure profile of the intracluster medium is critical for cluster cosmology and understanding galaxy-cluster astrophysics. We determine the population-averaged pressure profile of Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) selected clusters, characterize its intrinsic scatter, and measure its scaling with mass and redshift. We select 60 clusters from the South Pole Telescope (SPT) SZ catalog with 0.08<z<0.6, requiring high signal-to-noise and 5 element resolution on Planck-SPT Compton-y maps. We model spherical three-dimensional pressure profiles from the Compton-y maps using a hierarchical Bayesian framework with restricted cubic splines. We adopt an updated weak-lensing-calibrated Compton-Y--mass scaling relation, effectively removing hydrostatic mass bias from the inferred masses. Our model accounts for cluster-to-cluster profile variations, line-of-sight foreground and background contributions, and outliers from intrinsically distinct clusters or projection effects. The code is publicly available. We derive the population-averaged pressure profile and find minimal intrinsic scatter at intermediate radii (0.4 ≤ r/r500 ≤ 0.7). Our pressure profile is approximately 40\% lower than previous estimates at all radii, due to the unbiased mass scaling. We find suggestive, though not conclusive, evidence that the adopted mass dependence may require revision by removing the additional M0.12 scaling introduced by Arnaud et al. 2010. We constrain departures from self-similar evolution in the mean profile to less than 0.1--0.2 dex and evolution of the intrinsic scatter to less than 8\% per Δz=0.1.
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BibTeX
@misc{andreon2026cluster,
title = {{How Cluster Pressure Profiles Scale: Mass, Redshift, and Intrinsic Scatter}},
author = {S. Andreon and F. Castagna},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.05612},
eprint = {2609.05612},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05612},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - How Cluster Pressure Profiles Scale: Mass, Redshift, and Intrinsic Scatter
AU - S. Andreon
AU - F. Castagna
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/04
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.05612
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05612
AB - [shortened] The thermal pressure profile of the intracluster medium is critical for cluster cosmology and understanding galaxy-cluster astrophysics. We determine the population-averaged pressure profile of Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) selected clusters, characterize its intrinsic scatter, and measure its scaling with mass and redshift. We select 60 clusters from the South Pole Telescope (SPT) SZ catalog with 0.08<z<0.6, requiring high signal-to-noise and 5 element resolution on Planck-SPT Compton-y maps. We model spherical three-dimensional pressure profiles from the Compton-y maps using a hierarchical Bayesian framework with restricted cubic splines. We adopt an updated weak-lensing-calibrated Compton-Y--mass scaling relation, effectively removing hydrostatic mass bias from the inferred masses. Our model accounts for cluster-to-cluster profile variations, line-of-sight foreground and background contributions, and outliers from intrinsically distinct clusters or projection effects. The code is publicly available. We derive the population-averaged pressure profile and find minimal intrinsic scatter at intermediate radii (0.4 ≤ r/r_500 ≤ 0.7). Our pressure profile is approximately 40\% lower than previous estimates at all radii, due to the unbiased mass scaling. We find suggestive, though not conclusive, evidence that the adopted mass dependence may require revision by removing the additional M^0.12 scaling introduced by Arnaud et al. 2010. We constrain departures from self-similar evolution in the mean profile to less than 0.1--0.2 dex and evolution of the intrinsic scatter to less than 8\% per Δz=0.1.
ER -