El Gordo needs El Anzuelo: Probing the structure of cluster members with multi-band extended arcs in JWST data

¹ Technical University of Munich, TUM School of Natural Sciences, Department of Physics, James-Franck-Str 1, 85748 Garching, Germany
² Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 1, 85748 Garching, Germany
³ ORIGINS Excellence Cluster, Boltzmannstr. 2, 85748 Garching, Germany
⁴ Radboud University, Heyendaalseweg 135, 6525 AJ Nijmegen, The Netherlands
⁵ Technische Universität München (TUM), Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748 Garching, Germany
⁶ Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 Munich, Germany

Received: 6 March 2024
Accepted: 3 July 2024

Abstract

Gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters involves hundreds of galaxies over a large redshift range and increases the likelihood of rare phenomena (supernovae, microlensing, dark substructures, etc.). Characterizing the mass and light distributions of foreground and background objects often requires a combination of high-resolution data and advanced modeling techniques. We present the detailed analysis of El Anzuelo, a prominent quintuply imaged dusty star-forming galaxy (ɀ_s = 2.29), mainly lensed by three members of the massive galaxy cluster ACT-CL J0102–4915, also known as El Gordo (ɀ_d = 0.87). We leverage JWST/NIRCam images, which contain lensing features that were unseen in previous HST images, using a Bayesian, multi-wavelength, differentiable and GPU-accelerated modeling framework that combines HERCULENS (lens modeling) and NIFTY (field model and inference) software packages. For one of the deflectors, we complement lensing constraints with stellar kinematics measured from VLT/MUSE data. In our lens model, we explicitly include the mass distribution of the cluster, locally corrected by a constant shear field. We find that the two main deflectors (L1 and L2) have logarithmic mass density slopes steeper than isothermal, with γ_L1 = 2.23 ± 0.05 and γ_L2 = 2.21 ± 0.04. We argue that such steep density profiles can arise due to tidally truncated mass distributions, which we probe thanks to the cluster lensing boost and the strong asymmetry of the lensing configuration. Moreover, our three-dimensional source model captures most of the surface brightness of the lensed galaxy, revealing a clump with a maximum diameter of 400 parsecs at the source redshift, visible at wavelengths λ_rest ≳ 0.6 µm. Finally, we caution on using point-like features within extended arcs to constrain galaxy-scale lens models before securing them with extended arc modeling.