12:00–1:00 pm Zoom
Yuanyuan Zhang (Texas A&M University) "Studying the Faint Diffuse Stellar Envelope of Galaxy Clusters: Challenges, Results and Future Prospect"
Host: Lucas Secco
The low surface brightness domain of astrophysical observation beyond V~27.5 mag/arcsec2 remains relatively unexplored in the past fifty years (Abraham et al. 2017)”. Thanks to instrument developments, and also to the enormous amount of data collected by ongoing optical cosmic surveys, some progresses have been made in the past a few years. In this talk, I will discuss how we study the faint diffuse envelopes of galaxies and galaxy clusters with data from the Dark Energy Survey. By analyzing the images of a few hundreds of galaxy clusters, we measure the profiles of diffuse intra-cluster light beyond a surface brightness limit of 30 mag/arcsec^2, out to~1 Mpc from the cluster center. The measurements allow us to further quantify the correlation between the intra-cluster light luminosity and galaxy cluster richness and estimate some implications for cosmological studies. Moving forward, with bigger and deeper data sets becoming available, and Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time soon to be commissioned, we should be able to significantly improve those low surface-brightness measurements in the coming years.
