English

Sensitive 3mm Imaging of Discrete Sources in the Fields of X-ray-Selected Galaxy Clusters

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2026-08-02 v1

Abstract

In this paper, we present the results of a blind survey for compact sources in 138 galaxy clusters from the eFEDS X-ray survey. Of these clusters, 96 are new observations. These targets have X-ray mass estimates and redshifts that formally place them above the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (tSZ) survey limits from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT, DR5), yet were not detected. Compact sources with apparent locations close to (<104") the center of a galaxy cluster can in-fill the tSZ flux decrement, resulting in tSZ surveys missing clusters. To quantify the number of missing clusters from ACT, we carried out a survey at 90GHz using MUSTANG2 on the Green Bank Telescope and achieved a 5-sigma detection limit of 1mJy in the center of each cluster. We detected 11 discrete sources, which when scaled, is slightly lower than our previous tSZ selected sample, M2-ACT (8.0% vs 9.9%). All had radio counterparts. However, unlike the M2-ACT sample, the sources in X-ray selected clusters were concentrated closer to the cluster centers. When their effect on the measured tSZ signal is taken into account the sources we found would result in 4.5% of clusters being missed by tSZ surveys - a result similar to the estimate in recent ACT results. Most of the 96 clusters in eFEDS but not in ACT are a result of noise and overestimation of mass from X-ray measurements.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.00904,
  title  = {Sensitive 3mm Imaging of Discrete Sources in the Fields of X-ray-Selected Galaxy Clusters},
  author = {Simon R Dicker and Mark Devlin and Luca Di Mascolo and Saianeesh Haridas and Matt Hilton and Joshiwa van Marrewijk and Brian S. Mason and Emily Moravec and Tony Mroczkowski and John Orlowski-Scherer and Charles Romero and Craig Sarazin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.00904},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

9 pages, 6 figures, & 2 tables in main document, Figures 4 and table 1 reproduced in full in the appendix - pages 10 to 16. Submitted to ApJ