Mass and magnification maps for the Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields clusters: implications for high redshift studies

Understand

Extending over three Hubble Space Telescope (HST) cycles, the Hubble Frontier Fields (HFF) initiative constitutes the largest commitment ever of HST time to the exploration of the distant Universe via gravitational lensing by massive galaxy clusters.

• We here present models of the mass distribution in the six HFF cluster lenses, derived from a joint strong- and weak-lensing analysis anchored by a total of 88 multiple-image systems identified in existing HST data.
• The resulting maps of the projected mass distribution and of the gravitational magnification effectively calibrate the HFF clusters as gravitational telescopes.
• Allowing the computation of search areas in the source plane, these maps are provided to the community to facilitate the exploitation of forthcoming HFF data for quantitative studies of the gravitationally lensed population of background galaxies.