RXJ0437+00: Constraining Dark Matter with Exotic Gravitational Lenses

TL;DR

This study uses rare hyperbolic umbilic gravitational lensing configurations in galaxy cluster RXJ0437 to precisely constrain the inner mass distribution and investigate small-scale dark matter substructures, advancing dark matter research.

Contribution

It presents the first strong-lensing analysis of RXJ0437 with hyperbolic umbilic configurations, enabling new constraints on dark matter substructures at small scales.

Findings

Identified 13 multiply imaged galaxies, including rare H-U systems.

H-U images are located close to the cluster center, providing inner mass profile constraints.

Demonstrated the potential of H-U systems to probe dark matter substructures around 10^9 M_sun.

Abstract

We present the first strong-gravitational-lensing analysis of the galaxy cluster RXJ0437.1+0043 (RXJ0437; z = 0.285). Newly obtained, deep MUSE observations, Keck/MOSFIRE near-infrared spectroscopy, and Hubble Space Telescope SNAPshot imaging reveal 13 multiply imaged background galaxies, three of them (at z=1.98, 2.97, and 6.02, respectively) in hyperbolic umbilic (H-U) lensing configurations. The H-U images are located only 20 -- 50 kpc from the cluster centre, i.e., at distances well inside the Einstein radius where images from other lens configurations are demagnified and often unobservable. Extremely rare (only one H-U lens was known previously) these systems are able to constrain the inner slope of the mass distribution -- and unlike radial arcs, the presence of H-U configurations is not biased towards shallow cores. The galaxies lensed by RXJ0437 are magnified by factors ranging from 30 to 300 and (in the case of H-U systems) stretched nearly isotropically. Taking advantage of this extreme magnification, we demonstrate how the source galaxies in H-U systems can be used to probe for small-scale ($\sim 10^{9} M_{\odot}$) substructures, providing additional insight into the nature of dark matter.