RXCJ1347.5-1145 is the most X-ray luminous cluster in the sky, but the measurement of its gas and mass properties show remarkable inconsistencies. In particular, measurement of the hot intra-cluster gas using X-ray and the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect do not agree with each other. One way out of this puzzle is to postulate the cluster to be highly non-spherical. The goal of this project is to review the current set of observational data for this cluster, and arrive at a consistent picture.

The Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect is a measurement of the hot gas inside galaxy clusters, and it promises to reveal the low density gas in the cluster outskirts due to its linear dependence on gas density. However, imaging galaxy clusters up to their full extension without resorting to a model fit is a difficult task. Such model fitting invariably hides detailed structures present in the SZ data. Voronoi tessellation is a promising method to construct model independent 2D maps. The goal of this project is to try this method on one or two clusters detected by the APEX-SZ experiment, to find their actual 2D structures. The student will be using publicly available tessellation codes, and will collaborate closely with other group members working with APEX-SZ data.