English

Spectroscopic Tomography: A First Weak Lensing Detection Using Spectroscopic Redshifts Only

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2020-09-21 v3

Abstract

We describe the first spectroscopic tomographic (spectrotomographic) weak lensing measurement for a galaxy cluster based only on background galaxies with spectroscopically determined redshifts. We use the massive cluster A2029 to demonstrate the power of combining spectroscopy and lensing to obtain accurate masses and to overcome biases from contamination and photometric redshift errors. We detect the shear signal from the cluster at >3.9σ>3.9 \sigma. The shear signal scales with source redshift in a way that is consistent with the angular diameter distance ratio variation in a Λ\LambdaCDM Universe. Furthermore, the amplitude of the measured signal is consistent with the X-ray mass. Upcoming spectroscopic instruments such as the Prime Focus Spectrograph on Subaru will permit spectrotomographic weak lensing measurements with S/N comparable to current photometric-redshift-based weak lensing measurements for hundreds of galaxy clusters. Thus, spectrotomography may enable sensitive cosmological constraints that complement and are independent of other measurement techniques.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.05479,
  title  = {Spectroscopic Tomography: A First Weak Lensing Detection Using Spectroscopic Redshifts Only},
  author = {Ian Dell'Antonio and Jubee Sohn and Margaret J. Geller and Jacqueline McCleary and Anja von der Linden},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.05479},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

22 pages, 10 figures; significantly revised version now accepted for publication in ApJ

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:43:04.213Z