Measurements of the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect with ACT and DESI luminous red galaxies

Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) photons scatter off the free-electron gas in galaxies and clusters, allowing us to use the CMB as a backlight to probe the gas in and around low-redshift galaxies. The thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect, sourced by hot electrons in high-density environments, measures the thermal pressure of the target objects, shedding light on halo thermodynamics and galaxy formation, and providing a path toward understanding the baryon distribution around cosmic structures. We use a combination of high-resolution CMB maps from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and photometric luminous red galaxy catalogs from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument to measure the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich signal in four redshift bins from z = 0.4 to z = 1.2, with a combined detection significance of 19σ when stacking on the fiducial CMB Compton-y map. We discuss possible sources of contamination, finding that residual dust emission associated with the target galaxies is important and limits current analyses. We discuss several mitigation strategies and quantify the residual modeling uncertainty. This work complements closely related measurements of the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich and weak lensing of the same galaxies.