A large thermal energy reservoir in the nascent intracluster medium at a redshift of 4.3

Abstract Most baryons in present-day galaxy clusters exist as hot gas (≳10⁷K), forming the intracluster medium (ICM) 1. Cosmological simulations predict that the mass and temperature of the ICM rapidly decrease with increasing cosmological redshift, as intracluster gas in younger clusters is still accumulating and being heated 2–4. The thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ) effect arises when cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons are scattered to higher energies through interactions with energetic electrons in hot ICM, leaving a localized decrement in the CMB at a long wavelength 5, 6. The depth of this decrement is a measure of the thermal energy and pressure of the gas 7. To date, the effect has been detected in only three systems at or above z~2, when the Universe was 4 billion years old, making the time and mechanism of ICM assembly uncertain 8–10. Here, we report observations of this effect in the protocluster SPT2349−56 with Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). SPT2349−56 contains a large molecular gas reservoir, with at least 30 dusty star-forming galaxies (DSFGs) and three radio-loud active galactic nuclei (AGN) in a 100-kpc region at z=4. 3, corresponding to 1. 4 billion years after the Big Bang 11–14. The observed tSZ signal implies a thermal energy of ~10⁶1 erg, exceeding the possible energy of a virialized ICM by an order of magnitude. Contrary to current theoretical expectations 3, 4, 15, the strong tSZ decrement in SPT2349−56 demonstrates that substantial heating can occur and deposit a large amount of thermal energy within growing galaxy clusters, overheating the nascent ICM in unrelaxed structures, two billion years before the first mature clusters emerged at z~2.