Talk Details

Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - 4:15pm

Charles Majer:

"Joint reconstruction of galaxy clusters from gravitational lensing and thermal gas"

Abstract. I present a method to estimate the lensing potential from massive galaxy clusters for given observational X-ray data. The developed concepts can easily be combined with other techniques to infer the lensing potential, e.g. weak gravitational lensing or galaxy kinematics, to obtain an overall best fit model for the lensing potential. After elaborating on the physical details and assumptions the method is based on, I explain how the numerical algorithm itself is implemented with a Richardson-Lucy algorithm as a central part. This reconstruction method was tested on simulated galaxy clusters with an NFW density profile filled with gas in hydrostatic equilibrium. I will describe in detail how these simulated observational data sets were created and how they need to be fed into the algorithm. I would like to present some of these results. As it turns out this method achieves a very high degree of accuracy in reconstructing the lensing potential.