Kinematic Lensing Inference II: Cluster Lensing with 𝒪(1) Galaxies
Abstract
We present the first detection of a cluster lensing signal with ‘kinematic lensing’ (KL), a novel weak lensing method that combines photometry, spectroscopy, and the Tully–Fisher relation to enable shear measurements with individual source galaxies. This is the second paper in a two-part series aimed at measuring a KL signal from data. The first paper describes the inference pipeline, which jointly forward models galaxy imaging and spectroscopy, and demonstrates unbiased shear inference with simulated data. This paper presents measurements of the lensing signal from the galaxy cluster Abell 2261. We obtain spectroscopic observations of background disc galaxies in the cluster field selected from the Cluster Lensing and Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH) Subaru catalogue. The final sample consists of three source galaxies while the remaining are rejected due to insufficient signal-to-noise, spectroscopic failures, and inadequately sampled rotation curves. We apply the KL inference pipeline to the three sources and find the shear estimates to be in broad agreement with traditional weak lensing measurements. The typical shear measurement uncertainty for our sources is σ(g₊) ≈ 0.026, which represents approximately a 10-fold improvement over the weak lensing shape noise. We identify target selection and observing strategy as the key avenues of improvement for future KL programmes.
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Acknowledgement
We thank the referee, Edward Taylor, for their feedback which significantly improved the quality of this manuscript. We thank Keiichi Umetsu for providing CLASH WL shear estimates and discussions relating to the CLASH analyses. We also thank Andrew Robertson, Anja von der Linden, and Kevin Bundy for helpful discussions. This work was supported by NASA ROSES ADAP 20-ADAP20-0158. EK and PRS were supported in part by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. The analyses in this work were carried out using the High Performance Computing (HPC) resources supported by the University of Arizona Technology and Research Initiative Fund (TRIF), University Information Technology Services (UITS), and the office for Research, Innovation, and Impact (RDI), and maintained by the UA Research Technologies Department.
The mass models were constructed by Zitrin et al. (2009, 2015), and obtained through the Hubble Space Telescope Archive, as a high-end science product of the CLASH programme (Postman et al. 2012).
The Legacy Surveys consist of three individual and complementary projects: the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS; Proposal ID #2014B-0404; PIs: David Schlegel and Arjun Dey), the Beijing–Arizona Sky Survey (BASS; NOAO Prop. ID #2015A-0801; PIs: Zhou Xu and Xiaohui Fan), and the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS; Prop. ID #2016A-0453; PI: Arjun Dey). DECaLS, BASS, and MzLS together include data obtained, respectively, at the Blanco telescope, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NSF’s NOIRLab; the Bok telescope, Steward Observatory, University of Arizona; and the Mayall telescope, Kitt Peak National Observatory, NOIRLab. Pipeline processing and analyses of the data were supported by NOIRLab and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The Legacy Surveys project is honoured to be permitted to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation. NOIRLab is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. LBNL is managed by the Regents of the University of California under contract to the U.S. Department of Energy. This project used data obtained with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which was constructed by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundacao Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundacao Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico and the Ministerio da Ciencia, Tecnologia e Inovacao, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Cambridge, Centro de Investigaciones Energeticas, Medioambientales y Tecnologicas-Madrid, the University of Chicago, University College London, the DES-Brazil Consortium, the University of Edinburgh, the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institut de Ciencies de l’Espai (IEEC/CSIC), the Institut de Fisica d’Altes Energies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Ludwig Maximilians Universitat Munchen and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan, NSF’s NOIRLab, the University of Nottingham, the Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Sussex, and Texas A&M University. BASS is a key project of the Telescope Access Program (TAP), which has been funded by the National Astronomical Observatories of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (the Strategic Priority Research Program ‘The Emergence of Cosmological Structures’ Grant # XDB09000000), and the Special Fund for Astronomy from the Ministry of Finance. The BASS is also supported by the External Cooperation Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant # 114A11KYSB20160057), and Chinese National Natural Science Foundation (Grants # 12120101003, # 11433005). The Legacy Survey team makes use of data products from the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology. NEOWISE is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Legacy Surveys imaging of the DESI footprint is supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH1123, by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility under the same contract; and by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Astronomical Sciences under Contract No. AST-0950945 to NOAO.
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Additional details
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- ADAP 20-ADAP20-0158
- David and Lucile Packard Foundation
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-AC02-05CH1123
- National Science Foundation
- AST-0950945
- Accepted
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2025-05-07
- Available
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2025-05-23Published
- Available
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2025-06-14Corrected and typeset
- Caltech groups
- Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
- Publication Status
- Published