David Harvey, F. Courbin, J. P. Kneib, Ian G. McCarthy

A striking signal of dark matter beyond the standard model is the existence of cores in the centre of galaxy clusters. Recent simulations predict that a Brightest Cluster Galaxy (BCG) inside a cored galaxy cluster will exhibit residual wobbling due to previous major mergers, long after the relaxation of the overall cluster. This phenomena is absent with standard cold dark matter where a cuspy density profile keeps a BCG tightly bound at the centre. We test this hypothesis using cosmological simulations and deep observations of 10 galaxy clusters acting as strong gravitational lenses. Modelling the BCG wobble as a simple harmonic oscillator, we measure the wobble amplitude, A_w, in the BAHAMAS suite of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations, finding an upper limit for the CDM paradigm of $A_w < 2$ kpc at the 95% confidence limit. We carry out the same test on the data finding a non-zero amplitude of $A_w = 11.82^{+7.3}_{-3.0}$~kpc with the observations dis-favouring $A_w = 0$ at the $3\sigma$ confidence level. This detection of BCG wobbling is evidence for a dark matter core at the heart of galaxy clusters. It also shows that strong lensing models of clusters cannot assume that the BCG is exactly coincident with the large scale halo. While our small sample of galaxy clusters already indicates a non-zero Aw, with larger surveys, e.g. Euclid, we will be able to not only to confirm the effect but also to use it to determine whether or not the wobbling finds its origin in new fundamental physics or astrophysical process.

Krishna Naidoo, Aurélien Benoit-Lévy, Ofer Lahav

We reanalyse the cosmic microwave background (CMB) Cold Spot (CS) anomaly with particular focus on understanding the bias a mask (to remove Galactic and point sources contamination) may introduce. We measure the coldest spot, found by applying the Spherical Mexican Hat Wavelet (SMHW) transform on 100,000 masked and unmasked CMB simulated maps. The coldest spot in masked maps is the same as in unmasked maps only 48% of the time, suggesting that false minima are more frequently measured in masked maps. Given the temperature profile of the CS, we estimate at 94% the probability that the CS is the coldest spot on the sky, making the comparison to the unmasked coldest spots appropriate. We found that the significance of the CS is approximately 1.9 sigma for an angular scale R=5 degrees of the SMHW (< 2 sigma for all R). Furthermore, the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) contributes approximately 10% (mean of approximately -10 microK but consistent with zero) of the full profile of the coldest spots. This is consistent with recent LambdaCDM ISW reconstructions of line of sight voids.