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Register a new userOn Dark Peaks and Missing Mass: A Weak Lensing Mass Reconstruction of the Merging Cluster System Abell 520
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Merging clusters of galaxies are unique in their power to directly probe and place limits on the self-interaction cross-section of dark matter. Detailed observations of several merging clusters have shown the intracluster gas to be displaced from the centroids of dark matter and galaxy density by ram pressure, while the latter components are spatially coincident, consistent with collisionless dark matter. This has been used to place upper limits on the dark matter particle self-inteaction cross-section of order 1 cm^2/g. The cluster Abell 520 has been seen as a possible exception. We revisit A520 presenting new HST ACS mosaic images and a Magellan image set. We perform a detailed weak lensing analysis and show that the weak lensing mass measurements and morphologies of the core galaxy-filled structures are mostly in good agreement with previous works. There is however one significant difference -- we do not detect the previously claimed dark core that contains excess mass with no significant galaxy overdensity at the location of the X-ray plasma. This peak has been suggested to be indicative of a large self-interaction cross-section for dark matter (at least ~5 sigma larger than the upper limit of 0.7 cm^2/g determined by observations of the Bullet Cluster). We find no such indication and instead find that the mass distribution of A520, after subtraction of the X-ray plasma mass, is in good agreement with the luminosity distribution of the cluster galaxies. We conclude that A520 shows no evidence to contradict the collisionless dark matter scenario.
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Weak lensing applied to deep optical images of clusters of galaxies provides a powerful tool to reconstruct the distribution of the gravitating mass associated to these structures. We use the shear signal extracted by an analysis of deep exposures of a region centered around the galaxy cluster Abell 209, at redshift z=0.2, to derive both a map of the projected mass distribution and an estimate of the total mass within a characteristic radius. We use a series of deep archival R-band images from CFHT-12k, covering an area of 0.3 deg^2. We determine the shear of background galaxy images using a new implementation of the modified Kaiser-Squires-Broadhurst pipeline for shear determination, which we has been tested against the ``Shear TEsting Program 1 and 2 simulations. We use mass aperture statistics to produce maps of the 2 dimensional density distribution, and parametric fits using both Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) and singular-isothermal-sphere profiles to constrain the total mass. The projected mass distribution shows a pronounced asymmetry, with an elongated structure extending from the SE to the NW. This is in general agreement with the optical distribution previously found by other authors. A similar elongation was previously detected in the X-ray emission map, and in the distribution of galaxy colours. The circular NFW mass profile fit gives a total mass of M_{200} = 7.7^{+4.3}_{-2.7} 10^{14} solar masses inside the virial radius r_{200} = 1.8pm 0.3 Mpc. The weak lensing profile reinforces the evidence for an elongated structure of Abell 209, as previously suggested by studies of the galaxy distribution and velocities.
We examine the possible acceleration mechanisms of the relativistic particles responsible for the extended radio emission in Abell 520. We used new LOFAR 145 MHz, archival GMRT 323 MHz and VLA 1.5 GHz data to study the morphological and spectral properties of extended cluster emission. The observational properties are discussed in the framework of particle acceleration models associated with cluster merger turbulence and shocks. In Abell 520, we confirm the presence of extended synchrotron radio emission that has been classified as a radio halo. The comparison between the radio and X-ray brightness suggests that the halo might originate in a cocoon rather than from the central X-ray bright regions of the cluster. The halo spectrum is roughly uniform on the scale of 66 kpc. There is a hint of spectral steepening from the SW edge towards the cluster centre. Assuming DSA, the radio data are suggestive of a shock of $mathcal{M}_{SW}=2.6_{-0.2}^{+0.3}$ that is consistent with the X-ray derived estimates. This is in line with the scenario in which relativistic electrons in the SW radio edge gain their energies at the shock front via acceleration of either thermal or fossil electrons. We do not detect extended radio emission ahead of the SW shock that is predicted if the emission is the result of adiabatic compression. An X-ray surface brightness discontinuity is detected towards the NE region that may be a counter shock of $mathcal{M}_{NE}^{X}=1.52pm0.05$. This is lower than the value predicted from the radio emission ($mathcal{M}_{NE}=2.1pm0.2$). Our observations indicate that the SW radio emission in Abell 520 is likely effected by the prominent X-ray detected shock in which radio emitting particles are (re-)accelerated through the Fermi-I mechanism. The NE X-ray discontinuity that is approximately collocated with an edge in the radio emission hints at the presence of a counter shock.
We introduce a novel approach to reconstruct dark matter mass maps from weak gravitational lensing measurements. The cornerstone of the proposed method lies in a new modelling of the matter density field in the Universe as a mixture of two components:(1) a sparsity-based component that captures the non-Gaussian structure of the field, such as peaks or halos at different spatial scales; and (2) a Gaussian random field, which is known to well represent the linear characteristics of the field.Methods. We propose an algorithm called MCALens which jointly estimates these two components. MCAlens is based on an alternating minimization incorporating both sparse recovery and a proximal iterative Wiener filtering. Experimental results on simulated data show that the proposed method exhibits improved estimation accuracy compared to state-of-the-art mass map reconstruction methods.
We propose a novel method to reconstruct high-resolution three-dimensional mass maps using data from photometric weak-lensing surveys. We apply an adaptive LASSO algorithm to perform a sparsity-based reconstruction on the assumption that the underlying cosmic density field is represented by a sum of Navarro-Frenk-White halos. We generate realistic mock galaxy shape catalogues by considering the shear distortions from isolated halos for the configurations matched to Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey with its photometric redshift estimates. We show that the adaptive method significantly reduces line-of-sight smearing that is caused by the correlation between the lensing kernels at different redshifts. Lensing clusters with lower mass limits of $10^{14.0} h^{-1}M_{odot}$, $10^{14.7} h^{-1}M_{odot}$, $10^{15.0} h^{-1}M_{odot}$ can be detected with 1.5-$sigma$ confidence at the low ($z<0.3$), median ($0.3leq z< 0.6$) and high ($0.6leq z< 0.85$) redshifts, respectively, with an average false detection rate of 0.022 deg$^{-2}$. The estimated redshifts of the detected clusters are systematically lower than the true values by $Delta z sim 0.03$ for halos at $zleq 0.4$, but the relative redshift bias is below $0.5%$ for clusters at $0.4<zleq 0.85$. The standard deviation of the redshift estimation is $0.092$. Our method enables direct three-dimensional cluster detection with accurate redshift estimates.
Weak gravitational lensing is considered to be one of the most powerful tools to study the mass and the mass distribution of galaxy clusters. However, weak lensing mass reconstructions are plagued by the so-called mass-sheet degeneracy--the surface mass density kappa of the cluster can be determined only up to a degeneracy transformation kappa to kappa = lambda kappa + (1 -lambda), where lambda is an arbitrary constant. This transformation fundamentally limits the accuracy of cluster mass determinations if no further assumptions are made. We describe here a method to break the mass-sheet degeneracy in weak lensing mass maps using distortion and redshift information of background galaxies and illustrate this by two simple toy models. Compared to other techniques proposed in the past, it does not rely on any assumptions on cluster potential; it can be easily applied to non-parametric mass-reconstructions and no assumptions on boundary conditions have to be made. In addition it does not make use of weakly constrained information (such as the source number counts, used in the magnification effect). Our simulations show that we are effectively able to break the mass-sheet degeneracy for supercritical lenses, but that for undercritical lenses the mass-sheet degeneracy is very difficult to be broken, even under idealised conditions.
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