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Post Info TOPIC: Abell 3827
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Title: Light/Mass Offsets in the Lensing Cluster Abell 3827: Evidence for Collisional Dark Matter?
Authors: Liliya L.R. Williams, Prasenjit Saha

If dark matter has a non-zero self-interaction cross-section, then dark matter halos of individual galaxies in cluster cores should experience a drag force from the ambient dark matter of the cluster, which will not affect the stellar components of galaxies, and thus will lead to a separation between the stellar and dark matter. If the cross-section is only a few decades below its current astrophysically determined upper limit, then kpc-scale separations should result. However, such separations will be observable only under very favourable conditions. Abell 3827 is a nearby late stage cluster merger with four massive central ellipticals within 20 kpc of each other. The ten strong lensing images tightly surrounding the ellipticals provide an excellent set of constraints for a free-form lens reconstruction. Our free-form mass maps show a massive dark extended clump, about 6 kpc from one of the ellipticals. The robustness of this result has been tested with many reconstructions, and confirmed with experiments using synthetic lens mass distributions. Interpreted in terms of dark matter collisionality, our result yields sigma/m ~ 4.5 10^{-7} (t/10^{10} yr)^{-2} cm^2/g, where t is the merger's age.

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Cannibalistic Galaxy Bends Light & Reveals Its Monstrous Appetite

A newly discovered gravitational lens in a relatively nearby galaxy cluster is leading astronomers to conclude that the cluster hosts the most massive galaxy known in our local universe. The study also reaffirms that galactic cannibalism is one reason that this galaxy is so obese, tipping the scales at up to 30 trillion times the mass of our Sun.
The supermassive galaxy is located at the core of the galaxy cluster Abell 3827, which lies some 1.4 billion light-years away. This galaxy and hundreds of its smaller cluster companions are visible in a dramatic new image released by the Gemini Observatory. The image is part of an upcoming paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that reports on the study of the massive galaxy using the gravitational lens formed by its core to provide new measurements of the galaxys extreme mass.
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Title: Strong Gravitational Lensing by the Super-massive cD Galaxy in Abell 3827
Authors: E. R. Carrasco, P. L. Gomez, T. Verdugo, H. Lee, R. Diaz, M. Bergmann, J. E. H. Turner, B. W. Miller, M. J. West

We have discovered strong gravitational lensing features in the core of the nearby cluster Abell 3827 by analysing Gemini South GMOS images. The most prominent strong lensing feature is a highly-magnified, ring-shaped configuration of four images around the central cD galaxy. GMOS spectroscopic analysis puts this source at z~0.2. Located ~20" away from the central galaxy is a secondary tangential arc feature which has been identified as a background galaxy with z~0.4. We have modelled the gravitational potential of the cluster core, taking into account the mass from the cluster, the BCG and other galaxies. We derive a total mass of (2.7 ± 0.4) x 10^13 Msun within 37 h^-1 kpc. This mass is an order of magnitude larger than that derived from X-ray observations. The total mass derived from lensing data suggests that the BCG in this cluster is perhaps the most massive galaxy in the nearby Universe.

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