Characterizing the Shapes of Galaxy Clusters Using Moments of the Gravitational Lensing Shear
arXiv:astro-ph/0508118 · doi:10.1016/j.astropartphys.2005.09.003
Abstract
We explore the use of the tangential component of weak lensing shear to characterize the ellipticity of clusters of galaxies. We introduce an ellipticity estimator, and quantify its properties for isolated clusters from LCDM N-body simulations. We compare the N-body results to results from smooth analytic models. The expected distribution of the estimator for mock observations is presented, and we show how this distribution is impacted by contaminants such as noise, line of sight projections, and misalignment of the central galaxy used to determine the orientation of the triaxial halo. We examine the radial profile of the estimator and discuss tradeoffs in the observational strategy to determine cluster shape.
arXiv comment17 pages, 6 figures; added references, corrected typos, matches published version
References in corpus (15)
- A new measure for cosmic shear
- Internal and External Alignment of the Shapes and Angular Momenta of LCDM Halos
- Properties of galaxy dark matter halos from weak lensing
- The Effect of Gas Cooling on the Shapes of Dark Matter Halos
- Intracluster Light in Nearby Galaxy Clusters: Relationship to the Halos of Brightest Cluster Galaxies
- The Origin of the Brightest Cluster Galaxies
- Statistics of Giant Arcs in Galaxy Clusters
- Tree-Particle-Mesh: an adaptive, efficient, and parallel code for collisionless cosmological simulation
- Unbiased Cluster Lens Reconstruction
- Noise in strong lensing cosmography
- Reducing the shear
- Using Weak Lensing to find Halo Masses
- Surveys of Galaxy Clusters with the Sunyaev Zel'dovich Effect
- Constraining Omega using weak gravitational lensing by clusters
- Weak lensing analysis of Cl 1358+62 using Hubble Space Telescope observations