Inner dark matter distribution of the Cosmic Horseshoe (J1148+1930) with gravitational lensing and dynamics

Abstract

We present a detailed analysis of the inner mass structure of the Cosmic Horseshoe (J1148+1930) strong gravitational lens system observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). In addition to the spectacular Einstein ring, this systems shows a radial arc. We obtained the redshift of the radial arc counterimage zs, r = 1.961 ± 0.001 from Gemini observations. To disentangle the dark and luminous matter, we considered three different profiles for the dark matter (DM) distribution: a power law profile, the Navarro, Frenk, and White (NFW) profile, and a generalized version of the NFW profile. For the luminous matter distribution, we based the model on the observed light distribution that is fitted with three components: a point mass for the central light component resembling an active galactic nucleus, and the remaining two extended light components scaled by a constant mass-to-light ratio (M/L). To constrain the model further, we included published velocity dispersion measurements of the lens galaxy and performed a self-consistent lensing and axisymmetric Jeans dynamical modeling. Our model fits well to the observations including the radial arc, independent of the DM profile. Depending on the DM profile, we get a DM fraction between 60% and 70%. With our composite mass model we find that the radial arc helps to constrain the inner DM distribution of the Cosmic Horseshoe independently of the DM profile.