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American Astronomical Society, Astrophysical Journal, 1(580), p. L11-L15, 2002

DOI: 10.1086/345399

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Evidence for tidal stripping of dark matter halos in massive cluster-lenses

Journal article published in 2002 by Priyamvada Natarajan, Jean-Paul Kneib ORCID, Ian Smail ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Red circle
Preprint: archiving forbidden
Red circle
Postprint: archiving forbidden
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Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

In this letter, we present the results of our study of galaxy-galaxy lensing in massive cluster-lenses spanning $z = 0.17$ to 0.58, utilizing high-quality archival {\it Hubble Space Telescope} ({\it HST}) data. Local anisotropies in the shear maps are assumed to arise from dark matter substructure within these clusters. Associating the substructure with bright early-type cluster galaxies, we quantify the properties of typical $L^*$ cluster members in a statistical fashion. The fraction of total mass associated with individual galaxies within the inner regions of these clusters ranges from 10--20% implying that the bulk of the dark matter in massive lensing clusters is smoothly distributed. Looking at the properties of the cluster galaxies, we find strong evidence ($>3$-$σ$ significance) that a fiducial early-type $L^*$ galaxy in these clusters has a mass distribution that is tidally truncated compared to equivalent luminosity galaxies in the field. In fact, we exclude field galaxy scale dark halos for these cluster early-types at $>10$-$σ$ significance. We compare the tidal radii obtained from this lensing analysis with the central density of the cluster potentials and find a correlation which is in excellent agreement with theoretical expectations of tidal truncation: $\log [r_t*] ∝ (-0.6± 0.2) \log [ρ_0]$. Comment: minor revisions, ApJ Letters in press, matches print version