Journal article
Adaptive Reconstruction of Cluster Halos (ARCH): Integrating Shear and Flexion for Substructure Detection
The Astrophysical journal, v 1003(2), 171
01 Jun 2026
Abstract
We present Adaptive Reconstruction of Cluster Halos (ARCH), a new gravitational lensing pipeline for cluster mass reconstruction that applies a joint shear-flexion analysis to JWST imaging. Previous approaches have explored joint shear+flexion reconstructions through forward modeling and Bayesian inference frameworks; in contrast, ARCH adopts a staged optimization strategy that incrementally filters and selects candidate halos rather than requiring a global likelihood model or strong priors. This design makes reconstructions computationally tractable and flexible, enabling systematic tests of multiple signal combinations within a unified framework. ARCH employs staged candidate generation, local optimization, filtering, forward selection, and global strength refinement, with a combined fit metric weighted by per-signal uncertainties. Applied to A2744 and El Gordo, the pipeline recovers convergence maps and subcluster masses consistent with published weak+strong lensing results. In A2744, the central core mass within 300 h−1 kpc is 2.1 × 1014 M⊙h−1, while in El Gordo, the northwestern and southeastern clumps are recovered at 2.6 × 1014 M⊙h−1 and 2.3 × 1014 M⊙h−1. Jackknife resampling indicates typical 1σ uncertainties of 1012–1013 M⊙h−1, with the all-signal and shear+ F reconstructions providing the most stable results. These results demonstrate that flexion, when anchored by shear, enhances sensitivity to cluster substructure while maintaining stable cluster-scale mass recovery.
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Details
- Title
- Adaptive Reconstruction of Cluster Halos (ARCH): Integrating Shear and Flexion for Substructure Detection
- Creators
- Jacob Shpiece - Drexel UniversityDavid M Goldberg - Drexel University
- Publication Details
- The Astrophysical journal, v 1003(2), 171
- Publisher
- IOP Publishing
- Number of pages
- 8
- Grant note
- NASA: NAS5-26555 NASA Office of Space Science: NAG5-7584
The authors would like to thank Evan J. Arena and Jeimin Garibnavajwala for helpful conversations regarding the LENSER pipeline.Some/all of the data presented in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute. The specific observations analyzed can be accessed via doi:10.17909/4hd5-gn49 and doi:10.17909/e9rr-d448. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Support to MAST for these data is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science via grant NAG5-7584 and by other grants and contracts.
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Physics
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:001772738200001
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-105040390936
- Other Identifier
- 991022183054704721
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- Web of Science research areas
- Astronomy & Astrophysics