Dark Matter in Galaxy Clusters
Authors:   , Groener Austen M. , Goldberg David M. 
Published: July 2021

We explore the intrinsic distribution of dark matter within galaxy clusters, by combining insights from the largest N-body simulations as well as the largest observational dataset of its kind. Firstly, we study the intrinsic shape and alignment of isodensities of galaxy cluster halos extracted from the MultiDark MDR1 cosmological simulation. We find that the simulated halos are extremely prolate on small scales and increasingly spherical on larger ones. Due to this trend, analytical projection along the line of sight produces an overestimate of the concentration index as a decreasing function of radius, which we quantify by using both the intrinsic distribution of 3D concentrations c₂₀₀ and isodensity shape on weak and strong lensing scales. We find this difference to be ~ 18% (~ 9%) for low (medium) mass cluster halos with intrinsically low concentrations (c₂₀₀ = 1 - 3), while we find virtually no difference for halos with intrinsically high concentrations. Isodensities are found to be fairly well-aligned throughout the entirety of the radial scale of each halo population. However, major axes of individual halos have been found to deviate by as much as ~ 30°. We also present a value-added catalog of our analysis results, which we have made publicly available to download. Following that, we then turn to observational measurements galaxy clusters. Scaling relations of clusters have made them particularly important cosmological probes of structure formation. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of the relation between two profile observables, concentration (c_[vir]) and mass (M_[vir]). We have collected the largest known sample of measurements from the literature which make use of one or more of the following reconstruction techniques: Weak gravitational lensing (WL), strong gravitational lensing (SL), Weak+Strong Lensing (WL+SL), the Caustic Method (CM), Line-of-sight Velocity Dispersion (LOSVD), and X-ray. We find that the concentration-mass (c-M) relation is highly variable depending upon the reconstruction technique used. We also find concentrations derived from dark matter only simulations (at approximately M_[vir] ~ 10¹⁴M_[sun]) to be inconsistent with the WL and WL+SL relations at the 1[sigma] level, even after the projection of triaxial halos is taken into account. However, to fully determine consistency between simulations and observations, a volume-limited sample of clusters is required, as selection effects become increasingly more important in answering this. Interestingly, we also find evidence for a steeper WL+SL relation as compared to WL alone, a result which could perhaps be caused by the varying shape of cluster isodensities, though most likely reflects differences in selection effects caused by these two techniques. Lastly, we compare concentration and mass measurements of individual clusters made using more than one technique, highlighting the magnitude of the potential bias which could exist in such observational samples. Finally, we explore the large-scale environment around galaxy clusters using spectroscopically confirmed galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 10. We correlate the angular structure of the distribution of galaxies (out to a distance of 10h⁻¹ Mpc) around 92 galaxy clusters with their corresponding mass and concentration measurements. We find that the orientation of the cluster environment on this scale has little impact on the value of cluster measurements.