Title: Subaru Weak Lensing Measurements of Four Strong Lensing Clusters: Are Lensing Clusters Over-Concentrated? Authors: Masamune Oguri, Joseph F. Hennawi, Michael D. Gladders, Haakon Dahle, Priyamvada Natarajan, Neal Dalal, Benjamin P. Koester, Keren Sharon, Matthew Bayliss
We derive radial mass profiles of four strong lensing selected clusters which show prominent giant arcs (Abell 1703, SDSS J1446+3032, SDSS J1531+3414, and SDSS J2111-0115), by combining detailed strong lens modelling with weak lensing shear measured from deep Subaru Suprime-cam images. Weak lensing signals are detected at high significance for all four clusters, whose redshifts range from z=0.28 to 0.64. We demonstrate that adding strong lensing information with known arc redshifts significantly improves constraints on the mass density profile, compared to those obtained from weak lensing alone. While the mass profiles are well fitted by the universal form predicted in N-body simulations of the LCDM model, all four clusters appear to be slightly more centrally concentrated (the concentration parameters c_vir ~ 8) than theoretical predictions, even after accounting for the bias toward higher concentrations inherent in lensing selected samples. Our results are consistent with previous studies which similarly detected a concentration excess, and increases the total number of clusters studied with the combined strong and weak lensing technique to ten. Combining our sample with previous work, we find that clusters with larger Einstein radii are more anomalously concentrated. We also present a detailed model of the lensing cluster A1703 with constraints from multiple image families, and find the dark matter inner density profile to be cuspy with the slope consistent with -1, in agreement with expectations.
Title: Discovery of four gravitational lensing systems by clusters in the SDSS DR6 Authors: Zhong-Lue Wen, Jin-Lin Han, Xiang-Yang Xu, Yun-Ying Jiang, Zhi-Qing Guo, Peng-Fei Wang, Feng-Shan Liu (Version v7)
We report the discovery of 4 strong gravitational lensing systems by visual inspections of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey images of galaxy clusters in Data Release 6 (SDSS DR6). Two of the four systems show Einstein rings while the others show tangential giant arcs. These arcs or rings have large angular separations (>8") from the bright central galaxies and show bluer colour compared with the red cluster galaxies. In addition, we found 5 probable and 4 possible lenses by galaxy clusters.
A Sydney researcher has developed technology to enable astronomers to get sharper pictures of distant galaxies. As a PhD student at Sydney University's School of Physics, Brendon Brewer developed a computer program to help understand gravitational lensing. This is a phenomenon sometimes referred to by astronomers as a "natural telescope", which can bend and stretch images into different shapes, making it difficult to clearly observe distant galaxies. The 25-year-old's de-lensing program allows the gravitational lens to be used as a natural telescope, but without the distortion.