Musket Ball Cluster redshift catalog

To properly constrain the dark matter cross-section it is necessary to understand the dynamics of the merger, as the inferred cross-section is a function of both the velocity of the collision and the observed time since collision.

While the best understanding of merging system dynamics comes from N-body simulations, these are computationally intensive and often explore only a limited volume of the merger phase space allowed by observed parameter uncertainty. Simple analytic models exist but the assumptions of these methods invalidate their results near the collision time, plus error propagation of the highly correlated merger parameters is unfeasible.