Measuring Gravitational Lensing Flexions in Abell 1689 Using an Analytic Image Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new analytic image modeling method to measure gravitational lensing flexions, enabling detailed mapping of dark matter substructure in galaxy clusters like Abell 1689.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, mass-sheet-invariant analytic image model for flexion measurement, improving accuracy over previous methods and successfully applying it to real HST data.

Findings

Successfully reproduces input flexion fields in simulations

Detects mass substructure in Abell 1689 using flexion measurements

Demonstrates the effectiveness of the AIM method on real observational data

Abstract

Measuring dark matter substructure within galaxy cluster haloes is a fundamental probe of the Lambda-CDM model of structure formation. Gravitational lensing is a technique for measuring the total mass distribution which is independent of the nature of the gravitating matter, making it a vital tool for studying these dark-matter dominated objects. We present a new method for measuring weak gravitational lensing flexions, the gradients of the lensing shear field, to measure mass distributions on small angular scales. While previously published methods for measuring flexions focus on measuring derived properties of the lensed images, such as shapelet coefficients or surface brightness moments, our method instead fits a mass-sheet-transformation-invariant Analytic Image Model (AIM) to the each galaxy image. This simple parametric model traces the distortion of lensed image isophotes and constrains the flexion fields. We test the AIM method using simulated data images with realistic noise and a variety of unlensed image properties, and show that it successfully reproduces the input flexion fields. We also apply the AIM method for flexion measurement to Hubble Space Telescope observations of Abell 1689, and detect mass structure in the cluster using flexions measured with the AIM method.