Gravitational Imaging in Well-Constrained Clusters: Absolute Masses and Faint Galaxy Redshifts

Statistics – Applications

Scientific paper

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Hst Proposal Id #5935 Galaxies &Amp, Clusters

Scientific paper

The shear of faint galaxy images arising from gravitationallensing by foreground massive clusters provides importantconstraints on the distribution and total amount of mass inthe clusters. Furthermore, in a few rare clusters, the lensingmodels may be sufficiently well-constrained by arcs andmultiple images to yield robust redshift estimates for faintgalaxies well beyond reach of current spectrographs. Ground-based telescopes suffer systematic degradations which reducethe detected shear by factors of ~2-3. Detecting theunadulterated shear pattern with HST will yield an absolutecalibration of ground-based results and confirm or otherwisethe high cluster mass/light ratios obtained so far. We proposedeep WFPC-2 imaging of two of the most well-studied clustersfor this purpose. Both have the rare distinction of havinglensed features of known redshift which strongly constrain theabsolute mass. When calibrated with the HST shear, not onlywill more reliable mass maps result, but the lensing equationscan be inverted to provide statistical distances for largenumbers of very faint field galaxies. These will be invaluablein studies of galaxy evolution and for subsequent lensingapplications in other clusters.

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