| Hot Electrons And Cold Photons: Galaxy Clusters And The Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect (2007) | |||||||||||||
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| Introduction The hot gas in clusters of galaxies emits thermal bremsstrahlung emission that can be probed directly through measurements in the X-ray band. Another probe of this gas comes from its effect on the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR): the hot cluster electrons inverse Compton scatter the CMBR photons and thereby distort the background radiation from its blackbody spectral form. Although this, the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect, is quite small, heroic efforts during the 1980's resulted in its detection in three moderately distant clusters of galaxies: A665, A2218, and CL 0016+16. It is well known that one of the purposes of conducting such measurements is to determine the Hubble constant. The technique has generated considerable interest because it is independent of all other rungs of the cosmic distance ladder and is effective over a wide range of redshifts: ¸0.02 to ¸1. In the last few years, the development of sensitive new i | |||||||||||||
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