Masses of galaxy clusters from gravitational lensing

TL;DR

This paper reviews how gravitational lensing can be used to measure galaxy cluster masses, emphasizing the importance of accurate weak lensing techniques and recent advancements in the field.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of gravitational lensing methods for galaxy cluster mass estimation and discusses recent improvements and applications.

Findings

Weak lensing enables direct cluster mass measurements.

Advances improve accuracy of mass estimates with larger samples.

The review highlights recent successful applications.

Abstract

Despite consistent progress in numerical simulations, the observable properties of galaxy clusters are difficult to predict ab initio. It is therefore important to compare both theoretical and observational results to a direct measure of the cluster mass. This can be done by measuring the gravitational lensing effects caused by the bending of light by the cluster mass distribution. In this review we discuss how this phenomenon can be used to determine cluster masses and study the mass distribution itself. As sample sizes increase, the accuracy of the weak lensing mass estimates needs to improve accordingly. We discuss the main practical aspects of these measurements. We review a number of applications and highlight some recent results.