2009/09/28 by David Bacon, D. J. Bacon, A. Amara +2 · 1 citation
Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Brightest cluster galaxy #Context (archaeology) #Dark matter #Dark matter halo #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Galaxy cluster #Galaxy formation and evolution #Galaxy rotation curve #Geography #Halo #Physics #Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics #Redshift #Remote Sensing in Agriculture #Substructure #Weak gravitational lensing #astro-ph.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.17316.x
8 pages, 8 figures, submitted to MNRAS
arxiv created 2009/09/28 · openalex publication_date 2010/08/27 · arxiv updated 2015/05/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
It is of great interest to measure the properties of substructures in dark matter haloes at galactic and cluster scales. Here we suggest a method to constrain substructure properties using the variance of weak gravitational flexion in a galaxy–galaxy lensing context; this is a statistical method, requiring many foreground–background pairs of galaxies. We show the effectiveness of flexion variance in measuring substructures in N-body simulations of dark matter haloes, and present the expected galaxy–galaxy lensing signals. We show the insensitivity of the method to the overall galaxy halo mass, and predict the method's signal-to-noise ratio for a space-based all-sky survey, showing that the presence of substructure down to 109 M⊙ haloes can be reliably detected.