The Thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Effect from Massive, Quiescent 0.5 ≤ z ≤ 1.5 Galaxies

We use combined South Pole Telescope (SPT)+Planck temperature maps to analyze the circumgalactic medium (CGM) encompassing 138,235 massive, quiescent 0.5 ≤ z ≤ 1.5 galaxies selected from data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The 1.85 arcmin resolution SPT-SZ maps with frequency bands at 95, 150, and 220 GHz were stacked, filtered, and fit with a gray-body dust model to isolate the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) signal, which is proportional to the total energy contained in the CGM of the galaxies. We detect the tSZ effect around these M _* = 10^10.9 M_☉ - 10¹² M_☉ galaxies with an overall signal to noise ratio of 8.0, which is large enough to allow us to separate them into 0.1 dex stellar mass bins which have corresponding tSZ detections of up to 4.3σ. We also detect dust emission in these quiescent galaxies with a significance of 8.2σ, and is significantly brighter at 150GHz than the level measured at lower redshifts. We correct for the 0.16 dex uncertainty in the stellar mass measurements by parameter fitting for an unconvolved power-law energy-mass relation, E_therm = E_therm,peak × (M_*/M_*,peak)^α. With the peak stellar mass distribution of our selected galaxies defined as M_*,peak = 2.3 × 10¹¹ M_☉ this gives E_therm,peak = 6.02_-1.24^+1.26 × 10⁶⁰ and α = 3.75_-0.92^+0.70 These values are consistent with z ≈ 0 observations and within the limits of moderate models of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) feedback, with the primary uncertainty coming from the theoretical estimates, not the observations. Thus, closer comparisons of these measurements with full numerical simulations will provide strong constraints on the coevolution of galaxies and AGN throughout cosmic time.