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Published May 21, 2008 | Published
Journal Article Open

Probing the slope of cluster mass profile with gravitational Einstein rings : application to Abell 1689

Abstract

The strong lensing modelling of gravitational 'rings' formed around massive galaxies is sensitive to the amplitude of the external shear and convergence produced by nearby mass condensations. In current wide-field surveys, it is now possible to find out a large number of rings, typically 10 gravitational rings per square degree. We propose here, to systematically study gravitational rings around galaxy clusters to probe the cluster mass profile beyond the cluster strong lensing regions. For cluster of galaxies with multiple arc systems, we show that rings found at various distances from the cluster centre can improve the modelling by constraining the slope of the cluster mass profile. We outline the principle of the method with simple numerical simulations and we apply it to three rings discovered recently in Abell 1689. In particular, the lens modelling of the three rings confirms that the cluster is bimodal, and favours a slope of the mass profile steeper than isothermal at a cluster radius ~300 kpc . These results are compared with previous lens modelling of Abell 1689 including weak lensing analysis. Because of the difficulty arising from the complex mass distribution in Abell 1689, we argue that the ring method will be better implemented on simpler and relaxed clusters.

Additional Information

© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 RAS. Accepted 2008 January 6. Received 2008 January 4; in original form 2007 October 10. The authors are very grateful to Raphael Gavazzi for very helpful discussions and comments on the paper. This project is partly supported by the Chinese National Science Foundation No. 10333020, 10528307, 10778725, 973 Program No. 2007CB815402 and Shanghai Science Foundations, and this work was undertaken within the frame of the French 'Agence Nationale de la Recherche' (ANR) project BLAN06-3 135448. HT acknowledges the financial support of the Shanghai Science Foundation for a visit to IAP and is grateful to the hospitality during the visit. HT also acknowledges the Dark Cosmology centre for their invitation in Copenhagen where part of this work has been carried out. The Dark Cosmology Centre is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation. JPK acknowledges support from CNRS. This work is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained through the archives of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555.

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