Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
We present a deep H-band image of the region in the vicinity of the cluster Abell 1942 containing the puzzling dark matter concentration detected in an optical weak lensing study by Erben et al. We demonstrate that our limiting magnitude, H 22, would be sufficient to detect clusters of appropriate mass out to redshifts comparable with the mean redshift of the background sources. Despite this, our infrared image reveals no obvious overdensity of sources at the location of the lensing mass peak, nor an excess of sources in the I 2 H versus H colour-magnitude diagram. We use this to constrain further the luminosity and mass-tolight ratio of the putative dark clump as a function of its redshift. We find that for spatially flat cosmologies, background lensing clusters with reasonable mass-to-light ratios lying in the redshift range 0 , z , 1 are strongly excluded, leaving open the possibility that the mass concentration is a new type of truly dark object.
Gray et al. (Wed,) studied this question.