Is Gravitational Lensing by Intercluster Filaments Always Negligible?

TL;DR

This paper examines how intercluster filaments influence weak gravitational lensing signals, especially under modified gravity theories like MOND, revealing potential significant effects that could challenge or falsify such theories.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis of filament-induced lensing distortions in MOND, highlighting their potential to impact interpretations of weak lensing data and test gravity models.

Findings

Filaments can cause substantial lensing distortions in MOND, even with zero projected density.

In GR, filaments negligibly affect weak lensing signals.

Filament effects could complicate the interpretation of anomalous lensing observations.

Abstract

Intercluster filaments negligibly contribute to the weak lensing signal in general relativity (GR), $\gamma_{N}\sim 10^{-4}-10^{-3}$. In the context of relativistic modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) introduced by Bekenstein, however, a single filament inclined by $\approx 45^\circ$ from the line of sight can cause substantial distortion of background sources pointing towards the filament's axis ($\kappa=\gamma=(1-A^{-1})/2\sim 0.01$); this is rigorous for infinitely long uniform filaments, but also qualitatively true for short filaments ($\sim 30$Mpc), and even in regions where the projected matter density of the filament is equal to zero. Since galaxies and galaxy clusters are generally embedded in filaments or are projected on such structures, this contribution complicates the interpretation of the weak lensing shear map in the context of MOND. While our analysis is of mainly theoretical interest providing order-of-magnitude estimates only, it seems safe to conclude that when modeling systems with anomalous weak lensing signals, e.g. the "bullet cluster" of Clowe et al., the "cosmic train wreck" of Abell 520 from Mahdavi et al., and the "dark clusters" of Erben et al., filamentary structures might contribute in a significant and likely complex fashion. On the other hand, our predictions of a (conceptual) difference in the weak lensing signal could, in principle, be used to falsify MOND/TeVeS and its variations.