Toward Detecting the Moving Lens Effect with Optical Spectroscopy

Relativity predicts that sky-plane motion of a gravitational lens changes the wavelengths of lensed photons. This moving lens effect is orders of magnitude smaller than cosmological and Doppler effects on the same photons, but can be isolated by comparing different strongly lensed images of a given source. With a massive, fast-moving lens such as a galaxy cluster falling into another cluster, lensed spectra of a given source could differ in wavelength by up to 1 part in 10 6. We examine the feasibility of detecting this effect with optical spectroscopy, using Keck/Deimos data on the merging cluster RM J001938.7+033557.3 as a case study. We also quantify the predicted sky-plane motions of systems likely to be identified as merging clusters in a Λ CDM cosmology, and investigate how information on sky-plane motions could help constrain merger models. We find that measurement of the moving lens effect would disambiguate between models in which the subclusters are outbound after first pericenter and those in which the subclusters have returned to the same separation after first apocenter.