Triaxial strong-lensing analysis of the z > 0.5 MACS clusters: the mass-concentration relation

TL;DR

This study performs a triaxial strong-lensing analysis of high-redshift MACS galaxy clusters, showing that accounting for 3D shapes aligns observed mass-concentration relations with LambdaCDM predictions, despite large Einstein radii.

Contribution

It introduces a fully triaxial modeling approach for strong lensing analysis of z > 0.5 clusters, addressing biases and reconciling observations with theoretical expectations.

Findings

Mass-concentration relation agrees with N-body simulations.

Clusters exhibit moderate orientation bias due to triaxiality.

Large Einstein radii are consistent with theoretical models when shape biases are considered.

Abstract

The high concentrations derived for several strong-lensing clusters present a major inconsistency between theoretical LambdaCDM expectations and measurements. Triaxiality and orientation biases might be at the origin of this disagreement, as clusters elongated along the line-of-sight would have a relatively higher projected mass density, boosting the resulting lensing properties. Analyses of statistical samples can probe further these effects and crucially reduce biases. In this work we perform a fully triaxial strong-lensing analysis of the 12 MACS clusters at z > 0.5, a complete X-ray selected sample, and fully account for the impact of the intrinsic 3D shapes on their strong lensing properties. We first construct strong-lensing mass models for each cluster based on multiple-images, and fit projected ellipsoidal Navarro-Frenk-White halos with arbitrary orientations to each mass distribution. We then invert the measured surface mass densities using Bayesian statistics. Although the Einstein radii of this sample are significantly larger than predicted by LambdaCDM, here we find that the mass-concentration relation is in full agreement with results from N-body simulations. The z > 0.5 MACS clusters suffer from a moderate form of orientation bias as may be expected for X-ray selected samples. Being mostly unrelaxed, at a relatively high redshift, with high X-ray luminosity and noticeable substructures, these clusters may lie outside the standard concentration-Einstein radius relation. Our results remark the importance of triaxiality and properly selected samples for understanding galaxy clusters properties, and suggest that higher-z, unrelaxed low-concentration clusters form a different class of prominent strong gravitational lenses. Arc redshift confirmation and weak lensing data in the outer region are needed to further refine our analysis.