Prague Relativistic Astrophysics

Robert Suhada

The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is 10-meter telescope operating at millimeter wavelengths whose primary goal is to search for clusters of galaxies via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect - the distortion of the cosmic microwave background imprinted by the hot intercluster plasma.

The mass and redshift distribution of the cluster population is sensitive to the geometry of the Universe and to the rate of structure growth. Galaxy clusters thus provide important insights into cosmological questions such as the nature of cosmic acceleration and the Gaussian character of underlying density perturbations. They can also serve as a consistency test of the general theory of relativity on cosmological scales.

I will explain the principles of cluster cosmology and give an overview of the SPT survey. I will discuss the current cosmological constraints from the SPT cluster data, highlighting the constraints on the dark energy equation of state, and the sum of the neutrino masses. I will also demonstrate the use of SPT clusters to answer astrophysical questions such as the cosmic evolution of gas cooling in the cluster cores and give examples of interesting individual systems discovered by SPT, raging from spectacular merging clusters to the most massive relaxed objects in the Universe.