THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE KINEMATIC SUNYAEV-ZEL'DOVICH EFFECT FROM THE WARM-HOT INTERGALACTIC MEDIUM TO THE FIVE-YEAR WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE DATA

We study the contribution of the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect, generated by the warm-hot intergalactic medium, to the cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropies in the five-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data. We explore the concordance Lambda CDM cosmological model, with and without this kSZ contribution, using a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. Our model requires a single extra parameter to describe this new component. Our results show that the inclusion of the kSZ signal improves the fit to the data without significantly altering the best-fit cosmological parameters except Omega(b)h(2). The improvement is localized at the l greater than or similar to 500 multipoles. For the best-fit model, this extra component peaks at l similar to 450 with an amplitude of 129 mu K-2, and represents 3.1% of the total power measured by WMAP. Nevertheless, at the 2 sigma level a null kSZ contribution is still compatible with the data. Part of the detected signal could arise from unmasked point sources and/or Poissonianly distributed foreground residuals. A statistically more significant detection requires the wider frequency coverage and angular resolution of the forthcoming Planck mission.