Stacked phase-space density of galaxies around massive clusters: Comparison of dynamical and lensing masses

TL;DR

This paper develops a halo-model based method to measure galaxy velocity dispersions around massive clusters using stacked phase-space density, confirming consistency with dark matter simulations and constraining modifications to gravity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel halo-model approach to analyze stacked phase-space density, linking galaxy velocities with cluster masses and testing gravity theories.

Findings

Galaxy velocity dispersion around clusters is consistent with dark-matter-only simulations.

Measured velocity dispersion constrains effective gravitational constant to be close to Newton's constant.

Method enables testing of gravity modifications at cluster scales.

Abstract

We present a measurement of average histograms of line-of-sight velocities over pairs of galaxies and galaxy clusters. Since the histogram can be measured at different galaxy-cluster separations, this observable is commonly referred to as the stacked phase-space density. We formulate the stacked phase-space density based on a halo-model approach so that the model can be applied to real samples of galaxies and clusters. We examine our model by using an actual sample of massive clusters with known weak-lensing masses and spectroscopic observations of galaxies around the clusters. A likelihood analysis with our model enables us to infer the spherical-symmetric velocity dispersion of observed galaxies in massive clusters. We find the velocity dispersion of galaxies surrounding clusters with their lensing masses of $1.1\times10^{15}\, h^{-1}M_{\odot}$ to be $1180^{+83}_{-70}\, \mathrm{km/s}$ at the 68\% confidence level. Our constraint confirms that the relation between the galaxy velocity dispersion and the host cluster mass in our sample is consistent with the prediction in dark-matter-only N-body simulations under General Relativity. Assuming that the Poisson equation in clusters can be altered by an effective gravitational constant of $G_\mathrm{eff}$, our measurement of the velocity dispersion can place a tight constraint of $0.88 < G_\mathrm{eff}/G_\mathrm{N} < 1.29\, (68\%)$ at length scales of a few Mpc about $2.5$ Giga years ago, where $G_\mathrm{N}$ is the Newton's constant.