Abell 611: I. weak lensing analysis with LBC

TL;DR

This paper presents a weak lensing analysis of galaxy cluster Abell 611 using LBC data, demonstrating the instrument's effectiveness in mapping mass distribution and estimating cluster mass with two shape measurement methods.

Contribution

First application of weak lensing analysis on Abell 611 with LBC, comparing KSB and Shapelets methods, and estimating cluster mass beyond the virial radius.

Findings

Mass within 1.5 Mpc is approximately 8 x 10^14 solar masses from aperture mass.

Mass estimates are consistent between KSB and Shapelets methods.

LBC enables detailed weak lensing studies with high background galaxy density.

Abstract

Aims. The Large Binocular Cameras (LBC) are two twin wide field cameras (FOV ~ 23'x 25') mounted at the prime foci of the 8.4m Large Binocular Telescope (LBT). We performed a weak lensing analysis of the z=0.288 cluster Abell 611 on g-band data obtained by the blue-optimized Large Binocular Camera in order to estimate the cluster mass. Methods. Due to the complexity of the PSF of LBC, we decided to use two different approaches, KSB and Shapelets, to measure the shape of background galaxies and to derive the shear signal produced by the cluster. Then we estimated the cluster mass with both aperture densitometry and parametric model fits. Results. The combination of the large aperture of the telescope and the wide field of view allowed us to map a region well beyond the expected virial radius of the cluster and to get a high surface density of background galaxies (23 galaxies/arcmin^2). This made possible to estimate an accurate mass for Abell 611. We find that the mass within 1.5 Mpc is: $(8\pm3)\times 10^{14} M_\odot$ from the aperture mass technique and $(5\pm1)\times 10^{14} M_\odot$ using the model fitting by a NFW mass density profile, for both Shapelets and KSB methods. This analysis demonstrates that LBC is a powerful instrument for weak gravitational lensing studies.