Weighing the Giants – III. Methods and measurements of accurate galaxy cluster weak-lensing masses

By D. Applegate, A. V. D. Linden, P. Kelly, M. Allen, S. Allen, P. Burchat, David L. Burke, H. Ebeling, A. Mantz, R. G. M. K. StanfordSLAC and 3 more. 2012

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We report weak-lensing masses for 51 of the most X-ray luminous galaxy clusters known. This cluster sample, introduced earlier in this series of papers, spans redshifts 0.15 < z_cl < 0.7, and is well suited to calibrate mass proxies for current cluster cosmology experiments. Cluster masses are measured with a standard `color-cut' lensing method from three-filter photometry of each field. Additionally, for 27 cluster fields with at least five-filter photometry, we measure high-accuracy masses using a new method that exploits all information available in the photometric redshift posterior probability distributions of individual galaxies. Using simulations based on the COSMOS-30 catalog, we demonstrate control of systematic biases in the mean mass of the sample with this method, from photometric redshift biases and associated uncertainties, to better than 3%. In contrast, we show that the use of single-point estimators in place of the full photometric redshift posterior distributions can lead to significant redshift-dependent biases on cluster masses. The performance of our new photometric redshift-based method allows us to calibrate `color-cut` masses for all 51 clusters in the present sample to a total systematic uncertainty of ~7% on the mean mass, a level sufficient to significantly improve current cosmology constraints from galaxy clusters. Our results bode well for future cosmological studies of clusters, potentially reducing the need for exhaustive spectroscopic calibration surveys as compared to other techniques, when deep, multi-filter optical and near-IR imaging surveys are coupled with robust photometric redshift methods.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ecology, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/470627a630d9a62c9e4e7410bd2a24499f1206ea

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Citations in the corpus

Dark Energy Survey Year 1 results: weak lensing mass calibration of redMaPPer galaxy clusters (2018, background): “…that the community has invested in a broad range of weak lensing experiments specifically designed to calibrate the masses of galaxy clusters (Applegate et al. 2014; von der Linden et al. 2014a,b; Hoekstra et al. 2015; Mantz et al. 2015b; Okabe & Smith 2016; Dietrich et al. 2017; Melchior et…”
Galaxy Alignments: Observations and Impact on Cosmology (2015, methodology): “As an example, tangential shear is important in determining the masses of galaxy clusters (Okabe et al. 2010; Applegate et al. 2014; Hoekstra et al. 2015), where ensemble-averaged tangential shear as a function of cluster-centric radius can be related to the projected mass, or fit by a parametric mo”
COSMOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS FROM GALAXY CLUSTERS IN THE 2500 SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2016, methodology): “…scale of the sample from a reanalysis of Vikhlinin et al. (2009b) using the more recent weak lensing mass estimates from Hoekstra et al. (2015, denoted with H15) and the Weighing the Giants (WtG) project (Kelly et al. 2014; Applegate et al. 2014; von der Linden et al. 2014a; Mantz et al. 2015).”
Cosmology and astrophysics from relaxed galaxy clusters - II. Cosmological constraints (2014, background): “…the availability of robust mass estimates for the target clusters from weak gravitational lensing (von der Linden et al. 2014; Kelly et al. 2014; Applegate et al. 2014, hereafter collectively Weighing the Giants, or WtG) allows us to directly calibrate any bias in the mass measurements from…”
Cluster Cosmology Constraints from the 2500 deg2 SPT-SZ Survey: Inclusion of Weak Gravitational Lensing Data from Magellan and the Hubble Space Telescope (2018, methodology): “In dH16, the amplitude of the observable–mass relation was set by a prior on the X-ray normalization AYX, which in turn was informed by external WL data sets (CCCP and WtG; Applegate et al. 2014; von der Linden et al. 2014; Hoekstra et al. 2015).”
Lensing is Low: Cosmology, Galaxy Formation, or New Physics? (2016, background): “…number density of source galaxies as a function of lens-centric distance such as magnification bias (Mandelbaum et al. 2006b), obscuration effects (Applegate et al. 2014; Melchior et al. 2015; Simet & Mandelbaum 2015), and local galaxy dependent quality cuts (Applegate et al. 2014; Melchior et…”
RELICS: Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (2019, background): “We also considered other factors in this selection, including X-ray mass estimates (Mantz et al. 2010; MCXC Piffaretti et al. 2011); weak lensing mass estimates (Sereno 2015 compilation including Weighing the Giants Applegate et al. 2014, von der Linden et al. 2014b; Umetsu et al. 2014; Hoekstra et ”
The Canadian Cluster Comparison Project: detailed study of systematics and updated weak lensing masses (2015, methodology): “We find that the resulting CCCP masses are on average 8 ± 4 per cent lower, which reduces to 6 per cent if we use the same source redshift distribution as Applegate et al. (2014).”
KiDS-450: cosmological parameter constraints from tomographic weak gravitational lensing (2016, background): “…effect (e.g. Hasselfield et al. 2013; Bleem et al. 2015; Planck Collaboration et al. 2016c), and improvements in the calibration of cluster masses (Applegate et al. 2014; Hoekstra et al. 2015), have resulted in constraints on cosmological parameters of comparable power to the KiDS-450 cosmic…”
Weighing the giants – IV. Cosmology and neutrino mass (2014, methodology): “More details can be found in Applegate et al. (2014).”
CLASH: JOINT ANALYSIS OF STRONG-LENSING, WEAK-LENSING SHEAR, AND MAGNIFICATION DATA FOR 20 GALAXY CLUSTERS (2015, methodology): “In the upper-right panel of Figure 9 we compare shearonly masses (MWtG) of Applegate et al. (2014) and our fulllensing masses (MCLASH), obtaining good agreement.”
Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: redshift distributions of the weak-lensing source galaxies (2017, methodology): “…techniques that find COSMOS samples of galaxies matched to a lensing source catalogue by a combination of magnitude, colour, and morphological properties have been applied by numerous studies (Applegate et al. 2014; Hoekstra et al. 2015; Okabe & Smith 2016; Cibirka et al. 2017; Amon et al. 2018).”
Robust weak-lensing mass calibration of Planck galaxy clusters (2014, methodology): “For the lensing masses, we determine M500 from fitting an NFW model to the observed shear profiles around cluster centroids determined from Chandra imaging, as described in Applegate et al. (2014).”
CLASH: WEAK-LENSING SHEAR-AND-MAGNIFICATION ANALYSIS OF 20 GALAXY CLUSTERS (2014, methodology): “Figure 8 shows a comparison of Subaru shear-based mass estimates (MWtG) from Applegate et al. (2014) to our Subaru weak-lensing results.”