English

Near-IR Weak-lensing (NIRWL) Measurements in the CANDELS Fields. II. Mass Mapping and Overdensity Characterization

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-05-18 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

The Hubble Space Telescope Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) fields offer an exceptional combination of depth, spatial resolution, and area for identifying a shear-selected sample of dark matter overdensities. We present the first near-infrared (NIR) weak-lensing (WL) analysis of the 0.23 square degrees covered by the HST CANDELS fields: COSMOS, UDS, EGS, GOODS-N, and GOODS-S. Leveraging the high sensitivity of HST NIR imaging to distant galaxies, we achieve a WL source galaxy density of 170\sim170 galaxies arcmin2^{-2}. Our analysis identifies 12 shear-selected overdensities spanning masses from M200=(0.2M_{200}=(0.2--2.2)×1014 M2.2)\times10^{14}\ M_\odot, with a median mass of M200=5.5×1013 MM_{200}=5.5\times10^{13}\ M_\odot, demonstrating the strong capability of NIR WL for measuring low-mass systems. The systems lie in the redshift range 0.22<z<0.90.22<z<0.9, with a mean redshift of z=0.68z=0.68. We utilize multiwavelength data to confirm the nature of the overdensities. Seven of the overdensities have diffuse X-ray emission reported in the literature, with X-ray centroids that are spatially consistent with our WL peaks, confirming their nature as collapsed structures. We find that our WL detections broadly follow the expected X-ray luminosity--WL mass scaling relations. By stacking the tangential shear of all detections, we determine the average radial mass density profile and find that it is well fit by an NFW model with fitted concentration and mass of 4.9±2.14.9\pm2.1 and M200=1.3±0.3×1014 MM_{200}=1.3\pm0.3\times10^{14}\ M_\odot, respectively. These results serve as a precursor to NIR WL science with the Roman High Latitude Wide Area Survey.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.15264,
  title  = {Near-IR Weak-lensing (NIRWL) Measurements in the CANDELS Fields. II. Mass Mapping and Overdensity Characterization},
  author = {Kyle Finner and Bomee Lee and Ranga-Ram Chary and Giuseppe Congedo and Kim HyeongHan and M. James Jee and Peter Taylor},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.15264},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

26 pages, 16 figures, submitted to ApJ version