The mass distribution of a moderate redshift galaxy group and brightest group galaxy from gravitational lensing and kinematics (original) (raw)
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Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): the halo mass of galaxy groups from maximum-likelihood weak lensing
We present a maximum-likelihood weak-lensing analysis of the mass distribution in optically selected spectroscopic Galaxy Groups (G3Cv5) in the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey, using background Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) photometric galaxies. The scaling of halo mass, Mh, with various group observables is investigated. Our main results are as follows. (1) The measured relations of halo mass with group luminosity, virial volume and central galaxy stellar mass, M*, agree very well with predictions from mock group catalogues constructed from a GALFORM semi-analytical galaxy formation model implemented in the Millennium ΛCDM N-body simulation. (2) The measured relations of halo mass with velocity dispersion and projected half-abundance radius show weak tension with mock predictions, hinting at problems in the mock galaxy dynamics and their small-scale distribution. (3) The median Mh|M* measured from weak lensing depends more sensitively on the lognormal dispersion in M* at fixed Mh than it does on the median M*|Mh. Our measurements suggest an intrinsic dispersion of σlog(M*)˜ 0.15. (4) Comparing our mass estimates with those in the catalogue, we find that the G3Cv5 mass can give biased results when used to select subsets of the group sample. Of the various new halo-mass estimators that we calibrate using our weak-lensing measurements, group luminosity is the best single-proxy estimator of group mass.
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Precise modelling of strong lensing systems can be affected by external mass distributions, e.g. the group or cluster within which the lens is embedded. In this article, we propose to turn this limitation to our advantage and to use precise strong lensing modelling to probe external mass distributions surrounding the lens. We consider SL2S J08544-0121, a galaxy group at z=0.35 that contains a strong lensing system. A simple elliptical isothermal potential cannot reproduce satisfactorily the strong lensing constraints. We include an external mass perturbation corresponding to the group within which the lens is embedded. The lensing properties of this perturbation are parametrised by its total mass M and a smoothing scale s that quantifies the characteristic scale over which M is distributed. For a range of these parameters, we are able to reproduce accurately the observations. This suggests that light is a good tracer of mass. Interestingly, this also shows that a localised strong le...