Café-Club, Catherine CERNY: “Probing the inner density profile of galaxy clusters with strong lensing and MUSE spectroscopy”

Catherine CERNY (Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Durham University): “Probing the inner density profile of galaxy clusters with strong lensing and MUSE spectroscopy”.

You can find the schedule of upcoming café-clubs and the video of old ones here.

Take care,
Carlo, Meriam, Mathilde

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ABSTRACT

Galaxy clusters are the most massive gravitationally-bound objects in the universe, and analysis of their structure can yield many fascinating answers and equally fascinating questions about the nature of the physics that holds them together. The presence of dark matter in galaxy clusters is a particularly interesting question, and there are many techniques that are currently being used to study everything from the ‘core-cusp’ tension in cluster cores to the exact distribution of DM throughout the clusters. One of these techniques is called strong gravitational lensing, which effectively allows us to use massive objects -like galaxy clusters- as natural ‘cosmic telescopes’ to study highly magnified background sources. Lensing can also be used to study cluster substructure and model dark matter distribution in clusters. In this talk, I will discuss the use of lensing as a way to probe the mass distribution of several galaxy clusters. I will also demonstrate how the combination of lensing and 2-D galaxy kinematics of the BCG can be used to effectively- and cheaply- study the shape of the dark matter distribution near the center of the cluster. I will use these models to discuss how we can effectively constrain the shape of the density profiles in galaxy clusters with strong lensing, as well as what impact this can  have on our current physical understanding of the universe.