Taking measurements of the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect forward: including uncertainties from velocity reconstruction with forward modeling

We measure the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect, imprinted by maxBCG clusters, on the Planck SMICA map of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Our measurement, for the first time, directly accounts for uncertainties in the velocity reconstruction step through the process of Bayesian forward modeling. We show that this often neglected uncertainty budget typically increases the final uncertainty on the measured kSZ signal amplitude by ≃15% at cluster scales. We observe evidence for the kSZ effect, at a significance of ≃2σ. Our analysis, when applied to future higher-resolution CMB data, together with minor improvements in map-filtering and signal-modeling methods, should yield both significant and unbiased measurements of the kSZ signal, which can then be used to probe and constrain the baryonic content of galaxy clusters and galaxy groups.