The Grism Lens-Amplified Survey from Space (GLASS). IV. Mass reconstruction of the lensing cluster Abell 2744 from frontier field imaging and GLASS spectroscopy

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed mass reconstruction of galaxy cluster Abell 2744 using combined strong and weak lensing data from Hubble Frontier Field images and GLASS spectroscopy, revealing the distribution of dark matter and stars.

Contribution

It introduces a new method for secure multiple image identification and combines spectroscopic and photometric redshifts for precise mass mapping of the cluster.

Findings

Mass map reveals dark matter distribution and stellar mass ratio variations.

Confirmed multiple image systems with spectroscopic redshifts at five different redshift planes.

Provided publicly available convergence, shear, and magnification maps.

Abstract

We present a strong and weak lensing reconstruction of the massive cluster Abell 2744, the first cluster for which deep Hubble Frontier Field (HFF) images and spectroscopy from the Grism Lens-Amplified Survey from Space (GLASS) are available. By performing a targeted search for emission lines in multiply imaged sources using the GLASS spectra, we obtain 5 high-confidence spectroscopic redshifts and 2 tentative ones. We confirm 1 strongly lensed system by detecting the same emission lines in all 3 multiple images. We also search for additional line emitters blindly and use the full GLASS spectroscopic catalog to test reliability of photometric redshifts for faint line emitters. We see a reasonable agreement between our photometric and spectroscopic redshift measurements, when including nebular emission in photometric redshift estimations. We introduce a stringent procedure to identify only secure multiple image sets based on colors, morphology, and spectroscopy. By combining 7 multiple image systems with secure spectroscopic redshifts (at 5 distinct redshift planes) with 18 multiple image systems with secure photometric redshifts, we reconstruct the gravitational potential of the cluster pixellated on an adaptive grid, using a total of 72 images. The resulting mass map is compared with a stellar mass map obtained from the deep Spitzer Frontier Fields data to study the relative distribution of stars and dark matter in the cluster. We find that the stellar to total mass ratio varies substantially across the cluster field, suggesting that stars do not trace exactly the total mass in this interacting system. The maps of convergence, shear, and magnification are made available in the standard HFF format.