Reconstruction of small-scale galaxy cluster substructure with lensing flexion

Abstract

We present a reconstructions of galaxy-cluster-scale mass distributions from simulated gravitational lensing data sets including strong lensing, weak lensing shear, and measurements of quadratic image distortions -- flexion. The lensing data is constructed to make a direct comparison between mass reconstructions with and without flexion. We show that in the absence of flexion measurements, significant galaxy-group scale substructure can remain undetected in the reconstructed mass profiles, and that the resulting profiles underestimate the aperture mass in the substructure regions by $\sim 25-40\%$. When flexion is included, subhaloes down to a mass of $\sim 3\times 10^{12}$ M${}_{\odot }$ can be detected at an angular resolution smaller than 10\arcsec. Aperture masses from profiles reconstructed with flexion match the input distribution values to within an error of $\sim 13\%$, including both statistical error and scatter. This demonstrates the important constraint that flexion measurements place on substructure in galaxy clusters and its utility for producing high-fidelity mass reconstructions.

15 pages, 7 figures, 1 table. Submitted to MNRAS

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• High Resolution Weak Lensing Mass-Mapping Combining Shear and Flexion
• relensing: Reconstructing the mass profile of galaxy clusters from gravitational lensing
• New highly precise weak gravitational lensing flexions measurement method based on ERA method
• A New Estimate of Galaxy Mass-to-Light Ratios from Flexion Lensing Statistics
• A short review on joint weak and strong cluster lens-mass reconstruction