Lensing Measurements of the Ellipticity of LRG Dark Matter Halos

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel weak lensing technique to measure the ellipticity of dark matter halos around galaxies and clusters, providing robust results that challenge previous assumptions and enabling future studies with upcoming surveys.

Contribution

The authors develop a new estimator that isolates halo ellipticity signals and reduces systematic errors, leading to more accurate measurements of dark matter halo shapes.

Findings

Measured halo ellipticity of 0.24 ± 0.06 for LRGs

Ruled out no ellipticity at 4σ confidence

Detected ellipticity in galaxy clusters at 3σ significance

Abstract

Lensing measurements of the shapes of dark matter halos can provide tests of gravity theories and possible dark matter interactions. We measure the quadrupole weak lensing signal from the elliptical halos of 70,000 SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies. We use a new estimator that nulls the spherical halo lensing signal, isolating the shear due to anisotropy in the dark matter distribution. One of the two Cartesian components of our estimator is insensitive to the primary systematic, a spurious alignment of lens and source ellipticities, allowing us to make robust measurements of halo ellipticity. Our best-fit value for the ellipticity of the surface mass density is $0.24 \pm 0.06$, which translates to an axis ratio of 0.78. We rule out the hypothesis of no ellipticity at the $4\sigma$ confidence level, and ellipticity < 0.12 (axis ratio > 0.89) at the $2\sigma$ level. We discuss how our measurements of halo ellipticity are revised to higher values using estimates of the misalignment of mass and light from simulations. Finally, we apply the same techniques to a smaller sample of redMaPPer galaxy clusters and obtain a $3\sigma$ measurement of cluster ellipticity. We discuss how the improved signal to noise properties of our estimator can enable studies of halo shapes for different galaxy populations with upcoming surveys.