High-temperature plasmas exist inside the clusters of galaxies. The temperature is on the order of 10 keV. These high-energy electrons interact with the 2.726 K cosmic microwave photons and distort the Planck spectrum. This is the well-known Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect. Since some of the clusters have temperature as high as 15 keV, it is extremely important to include the relativistic corrections in the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect. This has been recently done by our group as well as some other groups. In this talk I will discuss the importance of the relativistic corrections. In fact they will be extremely important for the forthcoming short-wavelength observations of the 2.726 K cosmic microwave background radiation.

Thursday, March 11th 1999, 15:30
Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, room 305