Shedding Light on the Matter of Abell 781

TL;DR

This paper revises previous weak lensing analyses of Abell 781 West, showing that statistical errors and the use of photometric redshifts explain earlier discrepancies with mass models, aligning lensing results with dynamical and X-ray measurements.

Contribution

It corrects statistical inference errors in prior work and demonstrates that using photometric redshifts resolves the tension between lensing and other mass estimates.

Findings

Corrected statistical analysis aligns lensing results with dynamical mass.

Photometric redshifts eliminate the tension with X-ray mass estimates.

Chance alignments of low-redshift sources can lower signal-to-noise in lensing studies.

Abstract

The galaxy cluster Abell 781 West has been viewed as a challenge to weak gravitational lensing mass calibration, as Cook and dell'Antonio (2012) found that the weak lensing signal-to-noise in three independent sets of observations was consistently lower than expected from mass models based on X-ray and dynamical measurements. We correct some errors in statistical inference in Cook and dell'Antonio (2012) and show that their own results agree well with the dynamical mass and exhibit at most 2.2--2.9$\sigma$ low compared to the X-ray mass, similar to the tension between the dynamical and X-ray masses. Replacing their simple magnitude cut with weights based on source photometric redshifts eliminates the tension between lensing and X-ray masses; in this case the weak lensing mass estimate is actually higher than, but still in agreement with, the dynamical estimate. A comparison of lensing analyses with and without photometric redshifts shows that a 1--2$\sigma$ chance alignment of low-redshift sources lowers the signal-to-noise observed by all previous studies which used magnitude cuts rather than photometric redshifts. The fluctuation is unexceptional, but appeared to be highly significant in Cook and dell'Antonio (2012) due to the errors in statistical interpretation.