Planck Union Catalog of SZ Clusters (SZ Union)

About the SZ Union Catalog

These catalogs contain a list of galaxy clusters detected through the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (SZ) and consist of candidate sources that were detected using multifrequency algorithms that use the distinct spectral signature of such clusters. This version of the SZ catalogs, a component of Planck Data Release 1, is derived from the data acquired by Planck between August 13 2009 and November 26 2010.

Three pipelines are used to detect SZ clusters: two independent implementations of the Matched Multi-Filter (MMF1 and MMF3), and PowellSnakes (PwS). The main catalog is constructed as the union of the catalogs from the three detection methods. The individual catalogs are provided for the expert user in order to assess the consistency of the pipelines. The union catalogue contains the coordinates and the signal-to-noise ratio of the detections and a summary of the external validation information, including external identification of a cluster and its redshift if it is available.

Name Intype Units Description
XINDEX int None Index - Used to cross-reference with individual catalogs
NAME char None Source Name
GLON double degrees Galactic longitude
GLAT double degrees Galactic latitude
RA double degrees Right ascension (J2000) transformed from (GLON,GLAT)
DEC double degrees Declination (J2000) transformed from (GLON,GLAT)
POS_ERR double arcmin Position uncertainty (95% confidence interval)
SNR double None Signal-to-noise ratio of the detection
PIPELINE int None Source pipeline: 1=MMF1; 2=MMF3; 3=PwS
PIPE_DET int None Pipelines which detect this object
PCCS char None Indicates whether this detection matches any PCCS source
VALIDATION int None External validation status
ID_EXT char None External identifier of cluster
REDSHIFT double None Redshift of cluster
COSMO char None Detection is in the cosmology sample
XCOMMENT char None Detection has a comment in the associated text file