Clusters of Galaxies: The Universe's Kaleidoscopes

Clusters of galaxies act as the most powerful gravitational lenses in the Universe due to the strong concentration of matter on scales of 100-500 kpc. This is especially true for X-ray selected clusters which are preferentially centrally concentrated.

We have catalogued the 200 most X-ray luminous clusters between 0.2 < z < 0.6. and we have HST, Chandra, JVLA and Herschel data for the large majority.

We have an on-going VLT MUSE survey that has observations of over 120 of these clusters to identify the brightest lensed sources as well as spectral information on cluster members.

These data place constraints on the nature of the background, lensed galaxies and thus the Dark Matter distribution in the clusters themselves and provide a rich legacy of targets for follow-up with the VLT, ALMA and JWST.

In particular, these observations identify the systems with the brightest lines that are vital for successful AO-assisted follow-up which will sub-divide light into many more spatial elements.

This project focuses on the brightest lensed sources that constrain the gravitational mass of the clusters and also the properties of the lensed galaxy.

Through the unprecedented statistics our MUSE survey provides, we will address a wide range of astrophysics questions with both the sample of several hundred lensed sources and the handful of most highly amplified systems that can be followed-up with other telescopes.