Paper detail

An alternative validation strategy for the Planck cluster catalog and $y$-distortion maps

We present an all sky map of the $y$-type distortion calculated from the full mission Planck HFI (High Frequency Instrument) data using the recently proposed approach to component separation based on parametric model fitting and model selection. This simple model selection approach allows us to distinguish between carbon monoxide (CO) line emission and $y$-type distortion, something that is not possible using the internal linear combination based methods. We create a mask to cover the regions of significant CO emission relying on the information in the $χ^2$ map obtained when fitting for the $y$-distortion and CO emission to the lowest four HFI channels. We revisit the second Planck cluster catalog and try to quantify the quality of the cluster candidates in an approach that is similar in spirit to Aghanim et al. (2014). We find that at least $93\%$ of the clusters in the cosmology sample are free of CO contamination. We also find that $59\%$ of unconfirmed candidates may have significant contamination from molecular clouds. We agree with Planck collaboration (2015) for the worst offenders. We suggest an alternative validation strategy of measuring and subtracting the CO emission from the Planck cluster candidates using radio telescopes thus improving the reliability of the catalog. Our CO mask and annotations to the Planck cluster catalog identifying cluster candidates with possible CO contamination are made publicly available.