We use the Planck full mission temperature maps to examine the stacked thermal Sunyaev-Zel ’ dovich ( tSZ ) signal of 188042 “ locally brightest galaxies ” ( LBGs ) selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 .
Our LBG sample closely matches that of , PCXI , but our analysis differs in several ways .
We work directly in terms of physically observable quantities , requiring minimal assumptions about the gas pressure profile .
We explicitly model the dust emission from each LBG and simultaneously measure both the stacked tSZ and dust signals as a function of stellar mass M _ { * } .
There is a small residual bias in stacked tSZ measurements ; we measure this bias and subtract it from our results , finding that the effects are non-negligible at the lowest masses in the LBG sample .
Finally , we compare our measurements with two pressure profile models , finding that the profile from provides a better fit to the results than the “ universal pressure profile ” .
However , within the uncertainties , we find that the data are consistent with a self-similar scaling with mass — more precise measurements are needed to detect the relatively small deviations from self-similarity predicted by these models .
Consistent with PCXI , we measure the stacked tSZ signal from LBGs with stellar masses down to \log _ { 10 } ( M _ { * } / M _ { \odot } ) \sim 11.1 - 11.3 .
For lower stellar masses , however , we do not see evidence for a stacked tSZ signal .
We note that the stacked dust emission is comparable to , or larger than , the stacked tSZ signal for \log _ { 10 } ( M _ { * } / M _ { \odot } ) \lesssim 11.3 .
Future tSZ analyses with larger samples and lower noise levels should be able to probe deviations from self-similarity and thus provide constraints on models of feedback and the evolution of hot halo gas over cosmic time .