[69.07] The Hubble Constant Derived from the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect

AAS 205th Meeting, 9-13 January 2005
Session 69 Cosmology: Population III, Distant SNe, and Dark Energy
Poster, Tuesday, January 11, 2005, 9:20am-6:30pm, Exhibit Hall

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[69.07] The Hubble Constant Derived from the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect

A.M. Stilp (University of Wisconsin-Madison/NRAO), S.T. Myers (NRAO)

One powerful way to determine the distance to galaxy clusters is the combination of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect (SZE) with thermal bremsstrahlung from hot gas in the intracluster medium. This technique allows a measurement independent of the cosmic distance ladder. We will present an analysis of two low redshift (z < 0.1) galaxy clusters, A3266 and A3558, using the above method. By combining SZE observations from the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI) with results of previously-published X-ray data, we fit models of cluster gas structure to the data using both a maximum likelihood method and a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. The best-fit models yield a measurement of distance to the galaxy clusters, and a value for H₀ can be calculated from the best-fit distances and published redshift data. We obtained a result of H₀ = 65±14 km s^-1 Mpc^-1 as an average of the H₀ values for each cluster, which is consistent with the value of 72±5 km s^-1 Mpc^-1 measured by WMAP. We will discuss the application of the MCMC algorithm to SZE and X-ray data as well as display the results of our own analysis using this technique. This work was supported by a NSF-REU site grant to Associated Universities, Inc./National Radio Astronomy Observatories.

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