Power spectrum estimation methods on intracluster medium surface brightness fluctuations

Abstract

Accurate estimation of galaxy cluster masses is a central problem in cosmology. Turbulence is believed to introduce significant deviations from the hydrostatic mass estimates. Estimation of turbulence properties is complicated by projection of the 3D cluster onto the 2D plane of the sky, and is commonly done in the form of indirect probes from fluctuations in the X-ray surface brightness and Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect maps. In this paper, we address this problem using simulations. We examine different methods for estimating the power spectrum on 2D projected fluctuation data, emulating data projected onto a 2D plane of the sky, and comparing them to the original, expected 3D power spectrum. Noise can contaminate the power spectrum of ICM observations, so we also briefly compare a few methods of reducing noise in the images for better spectral estimation.