Joint reconstruction of the mass distributions of galaxyclusters from gravitational lensing and thermal gas

Abstract

We focus on the reconstruction of mass distributions of the massive galaxy clusters, which are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the Universe. An approach to determine the masses of clusters is based on the effects of gravitational lensing. Estimating errors induced by this method is crucial but computationally expensive. We present a novel approach to estimate analytically the errors made by reconstructions which use weak-lensing information. As galaxy clusters host a large amount of intracluster medium they provide a multitude of observables. We present a new method to infer the lensing potential from two of these: signals of the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect and the emission of X-rays due to thermal bremsstrahlung. By assuming that the gas is in hydrostatic equilibrium and follows a polytropic equation of state, we link these observables to the gravitational potential, which is then projected along the line-of-sight to infer the lensing potential. For this we deproject the observables by means of the Richardson-Lucy algorithm. We test our method on clusters with analytic profiles, a numerical simulation and on the galaxy cluster RXJ1347. Our efforts are the first steps towards a non-parametric algorithm for a joint cluster reconstruction. By taking all possible cluster observables into account, mass distributions of clusters will be determined more accurately.