The Impact of Individual Galaxies on the Weak Gravitational Lensing by a Galaxy Cluster

Abstrakt

Weak gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters and larger structures is a powerful tool for mapping the distribution of matter in the universe. The lensing description is generally based on continuous matter distributions, which in the case of a cluster neglects the influence of its individual galaxies.

These may distort the images of background galaxies and affect the reconstructed matter distribution. We study the effect using a continuous dark matter halo model perturbed by a point mass.