Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 687, Issue 1, Pages 22-38Publisher
UNIV CHICAGO PRESS
DOI: 10.1086/589955
Keywords
cosmology: theory
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Using ray tracing for simple analytic profiles, we demonstrate that the lensing cross section for producing giant arcs has distinct contributions due to arcs formed through image distortion only, and arcs form from the merging of two or three images. We investigate the dependence of each of these contributions on halo ellipticity and on the slope of the density profile, and demonstrate that at fixed Einstein radius, the lensing cross section increases as the halo profile becomes steeper. We then compare simulations with and without baryonic cooling of the same cluster for a sample of six clusters, and demonstrate that cooling can increase the overall abundance of giant arcs by factors of a few. The net boost to the lensing probability for individual clusters is mass dependent, and can lower the effective low-mass limit of lensing clusters. This last effect can potentially increase the number of lensing clusters by an extra 50%. While the magnitude of these effects may be overestimated due to the well-known overcooling problem in simulations, it is evident that baryonic cooling has a nonnegligible impact on the expected abundance of giant arcs, and hence cosmological constraints from giant arc abundances may be subject to large systematic errors.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available