Using Caustic Methods to Measure the Masses of Galaxy Clusters

Details Using Caustic Methods to Measure the Masses of Galaxy Clusters Using Caustic Methods to Measure the Masses of Galaxy Clusters

Jan 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21922303g&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #223.03

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The ability to estimate galaxy cluster masses with a known systematic scatter for large cluster samples has become very valuable with the advent of large photometric and spectroscopic surveys. The caustic method has the capability to estimate masses for a wide range of halo sizes with no assumptions about the equilibrium of the system and can be applied using spectroscopic follow-up to any large survey. We use the most recent synthetic catalog created by the Dark Energy Survey collaboration to better constrain the systematic scatter in mass estimation both on individual clusters and stacked systems, while examining the effects of adding in observable systematics, including uncertainties in the radii, as well as different optical targeting algorithms. We also show how line-of-sight projections affect the caustic-inferred masses. This builds upon previous work which identified uncertainties using N-body simulations. We find that to reduce the scatter in caustic mass estimates to around 20%, a magic number of at least 50 galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts are needed within the virial radius of the cluster. The work of Dan Gifford is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

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