No Arabic abstract
We perform a weak lensing and photometric study of the z=0.42 supercluster MS0302+17 using deep I and V band images taken with the UH8K CCD mosaic camera at the CFHT. We use archival ROSAT HRI data to estimate fluxes, gas masses and, in one case, the binding mass of the three major clusters. We then use our CCD data to determine the optical richness and luminosities of the clusters and to map out the spatial distribution of the early type galaxies in the supercluster and in other foreground and background structures. We measure the gravitational shear from a sample of simeq 30,000 faint background galaxies in the range 22 < m_I < 26 and find this correlates strongly with that predicted from the early type galaxies if they trace the mass with M/L_B simeq 250 h. We make 2-dimensional reconstructions of the mass surface density. These recover all of the major concentrations of galaxies and indicate that most of the supercluster mass, like the early type galaxies, is concentrated in the three X-ray clusters, and we obtain mean mass-to-light ratios for the clusters of M/L_B simeq 260 h. Cross-correlation of the measured mass surface density with that predicted from the early type galaxy distribution shows a strong peak at zero lag (significant at the simeq 9-sigma level), and that at separations gsim 200 h^{-1}$kpc the early galaxies trace the mass very accurately. This conclusion is supported by cross-correlation in Fourier space; we see little evidence for any variation of M/L or `bias with scale, and from the longest wavelength modes with lambda = 1.5-6 h^{-1}Mpc we find M/L simeq (280 pm 40)h, quite similar to that obtained for the cluster centers. We discuss the implication of these results for the cosmological density parameter.
We investigate the supercluster MS0302+17 (z~0.42) using weak lensing analysis and deep wide field CFH12k BVR photometry. Using (B-V) - (V-R) evolution tracks we identify supercluster early-types members. We derive a R band weak lensing background galaxies sample. We compute the correlations functions of light and mass and show that light traces mass on supercluster scales. The zeta-statistics applied in cluster centers and global correlation analyses over the whole field converge toward the simple relation M/L_B=300+/-30. This independently confirms the earlier results obtained by Kaiser et al.(1998). We model dark matter halos around each galaxy by truncated isothermal spheres and find the linear relation M L still holds. However, their averaged halo truncation radius is s* ~< 200 kpc close to clusters cores, whereas it reaches a lower limit of ~ 300 kpc at the periphery. This change of s_* as function of radial distance gives indications on tidal stripping but the lack of informations on the late-type galaxies sample prevents us to separate contributions. Though all the data at hands are consistent with mass is traced by light from early-type galaxies, we are not able to describe in details the contributions of late type galaxies. We however found it to be small.
We describe in detail the processing of a set of images of the z = 0.42 supercluster MS0302 taken with the UH8K camera at CFHT. The result of this is a pair of seamless combined V- and I-band images of the field, along with a characterization of the noise properties and of the point spread function (PSF), and catalogs of about 30,000 faint galaxies. The analysis involves the following steps: image preparation; detection of stars and registration to find the transformation from detector to sky coordinates; correction for extinction and/or gain variations; modeling of the PSF; generation of images with a circular PSF; image warping and averaging; modeling of the noise auto-correlation function; faint object detection, aperture photometry, and shape measurement. The shear analysis is described elsewhere.
We present results from a spectroscopic study of ~4000 galaxies in a 6.2 square degree field in the direction of the Aquarius supercluster and a smaller typical field region in Cetus, down to R<19.5. Galaxy redshifts were measured using the Two Degree Field system on the Anglo-Australian Telescope, and form part of our wider efforts to conduct a spectro-photometric and weak gravitational lensing study of these regions. At the magnitude limit of the survey, we are capable of probing L_* galaxies out to z~0.4. We construct median spectra as a function of various survey parameters as a diagnostic of the quality of the sample. We use the redshift data to identify galaxy clusters and groups within the survey volume. In the Aquarius region, we find a total of 48 clusters and groups, of which 26 are previously unknown systems, and in Cetus we find 14 clusters and groups, of which 12 are new. We estimate centroid redshifts and velocity dispersions for all these systems. In the Aquarius region, we see a superposition of two strong superclusters at z=0.08 and z=0.11, which both have estimated masses and overdensities similar to the Corona Borealis supercluster.
We present a high resolution dark matter reconstruction of the z=0.165 Abell 901/902 supercluster from a weak lensing analysis of the HST STAGES survey. We detect the four main structures of the supercluster at high significance, resolving substructure within and between the clusters. We find that the distribution of dark matter is well traced by the cluster galaxies, with the brightest cluster galaxies marking out the strongest peaks in the dark matter distribution. We also find a significant extension of the dark matter distribution of Abell 901a in the direction of an infalling X-ray group Abell 901alpha. We present mass, mass-to-light and mass-to-stellar mass ratio measurements of the structures and substructures that we detect. We find no evidence for variation of the mass-to-light and mass-to-stellar mass ratio between the different clusters. We compare our space-based lensing analysis with an earlier ground-based lensing analysis of the supercluster to demonstrate the importance of space-based imaging for future weak lensing dark matter observations.
We present the first application of the 3D cosmic shear method developed in Heavens et al. (2006) and the geometric shear-ratio analysis developed in Taylor et al. (2006), to the COMBO-17 data set. 3D cosmic shear has been used to analyse galaxies with redshift estimates from two random COMBO-17 fields covering 0.52 square degrees in total, providing a conditional constraint in the (sigma_8, Omega_m) plane as well as a conditional constraint on the equation of state of dark energy, parameterised by a constant w= p/rho c^2. The (sigma_8, Omega_m) plane analysis constrained the relation between sigma_8 and Omega_m to be sigma_8(Omega_m/0.3)^{0.57 +- 0.19}=1.06 +0.17 -0.16, in agreement with a 2D cosmic shear analysis of COMBO-17. The 3D cosmic shear conditional constraint on w using the two random fields is w=-1.27 +0.64 -0.70. The geometric shear-ratio analysis has been applied to the A901/2 field, which contains three small galaxy clusters. Combining the analysis from the A901/2 field, using the geometric shear-ratio analysis, and the two random fields, using 3D cosmic shear, w is conditionally constrained to w=-1.08 +0.63 -0.58. The errors presented in this paper are shown to agree with Fisher matrix predictions made in Heavens et al. (2006) and Taylor et al. (2006). When these methods are applied to large datasets, as expected soon from surveys such as Pan-STARRS and VST-KIDS, the dark energy equation of state could be constrained to an unprecedented degree of accuracy.