- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/MNRAS/470/4838
- Title:
- Redshift catalog of HE 0435-1223 field-of-view
- Short Name:
- J/MNRAS/470/4838
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- Galaxies located in the environment or along the line of sight towards gravitational lenses can significantly affect lensing observables, and can lead to systematic errors on the measurement of H_0_ from the time-delay technique. We present the results of a systematic spectroscopic identification of the galaxies in the field of view of the lensed quasar HE 0435-1223 using the W.M. Keck, Gemini and ESO-Very Large telescopes. Our new catalogue triples the number of known galaxy redshifts in the direct vicinity of the lens, expanding to 102 the number of measured redshifts for galaxies separated by less than 3 arcmin from the lens. We complement our catalogue with literature data to gather redshifts up to 15 arcmin from the lens, and search for galaxy groups or clusters projected towards HE 0435-1223. We confirm that the lens is a member of a small group that includes at least 12 galaxies, and find 8 other group candidates near the line of sight of the lens. The flexion shift, namely the shift of lensed images produced by high-order perturbation of the lens potential, is calculated for each galaxy/group and used to identify which objects produce the largest perturbation of the lens potential. This analysis demonstrates that (i) at most three of the five brightest galaxies projected within 12 arcsec of the lens need to be explicitly used in the lens models, and (ii) the groups can be treated in the lens model as an external tidal field (shear) contribution.
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Search Results
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/888/35
- Title:
- Redshifts of lensed systems toward RXCJ2248.7-4431
- Short Name:
- J/ApJ/888/35
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- We present an iterative method to construct a freeform lens model that self-consistently reproduces the sky positions, geometrically inferred redshifts, and relative brightnesses of all multiply lensed images toward a galaxy cluster. This method is applied to the cluster RXCJ2248.7-4431 (z=0.348) from the Hubble Frontier Fields program, toward which 10 multiply lensed sources with accurate spectroscopic redshifts and 6 others with inexact photometric redshifts have been identified. Using the spectroscopically secure systems to define an initial lens model, we compute the geometric redshifts of the photometric systems. We then iterate the lens model by incorporating the photometric systems at redshifts shifted by incremental amounts toward their geometric redshifts inferred from the previous step; on convergence, we find geometric redshifts in good agreement with the spectroscopically determined redshifts, but they can depart significantly from the photometrically determined redshifts. In the final lens model, all 16 lensed sources tightly follow the cosmological form of the angular diameter distance relation. Furthermore, although they are not used as model constraints, our lens model predicts relative brightnesses between image pairs for a given set of multiply lensed images in reasonable agreement with observations, thus providing independent validation of this model.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/750/168
- Title:
- Redshift survey in the Subaru GTO2deg^2^ field
- Short Name:
- J/ApJ/750/168
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- We use a dense redshift survey in the foreground of the Subaru GTO2deg^2^ weak-lensing field (centered at 16:04:44+43:11'24 (2000) to assess the completeness and comment on the purity of massive halo identification in the weak-lensing map. The redshift survey (published here) includes 4541 galaxies; 4405 are new redshifts measured with the Hectospec on the MMT. Among the weak-lensing peaks with a signal to noise greater than 4.25, 2/3 correspond to individual massive systems; this result is essentially identical to the Geller et al. (2010ApJ...709..832G) test of the Deep Lens Survey (DLS) field F2. The Subaru map, based on images in substantially better seeing than the DLS, enables detection of less massive halos at fixed redshift as expected. We demonstrate that the procedure adopted by Miyazaki et al. (2002ApJ...580L..97M) for removing some contaminated peaks from the weak-lensing map improves agreement between the lensing map and the redshift survey in the identification of candidate massive systems.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/MNRAS/500/859
- Title:
- Ridges in the Dark Energy Survey
- Short Name:
- J/MNRAS/500/859
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- Cosmic voids and their corresponding redshift-aggregated projections of mass densities, known as troughs, play an important role in our attempt to model the large-scale structure of the Universe. Understanding these structures leads to tests comparing the standard model with alternative cosmologies, constraints on the dark energy equation of state, and provides evidence to differentiate among gravitational theories. In this paper, we extend the subspace-constrained mean shift algorithm, a recently introduced method to estimate density ridges, and apply it to 2D weak-lensing mass density maps from the Dark Energy Survey Y1 data release to identify curvilinear filamentary structures. We compare the obtained ridges with previous approaches to extract trough structure in the same data, and apply curvelets as an alternative wavelet-based method to constrain densities. We then invoke the Wasserstein distance between noisy and noiseless simulations to validate the denoising capabilities of our method. Our results demonstrate the viability of ridge estimation as a precursor for denoising weak lensing quantities to recover the large-scale structure, paving the way for a more versatile and effective search for troughs.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/769/52
- Title:
- SDSS luminous red galaxies concentrations
- Short Name:
- J/ApJ/769/52
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- The best gravitational lenses for detecting distant galaxies are those with the largest mass concentrations and the most advantageous configurations of that mass along the line of sight. Our new method for finding such gravitational telescopes uses optical data to identify projected concentrations of luminous red galaxies (LRGs). LRGs are biased tracers of the underlying mass distribution, so lines of sight with the highest total luminosity in LRGs are likely to contain the largest total mass. We apply this selection technique to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and identify the 200 fields with the highest total LRG luminosities projected within a 3.5' radius over the redshift range 0.1<=z<=0.7. The redshift and angular distributions of LRGs in these fields trace the concentrations of non-LRG galaxies. These fields are diverse; 22.5% contain one known galaxy cluster and 56.0% contain multiple known clusters previously identified in the literature. Thus, our results confirm that these LRGs trace massive structures and that our selection technique identifies fields with large total masses. These fields contain two to three times higher total LRG luminosities than most known strong-lensing clusters and will be among the best gravitational lensing fields for the purpose of detecting the highest redshift galaxies.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/132/999
- Title:
- SDSS quasar lens search
- Short Name:
- J/AJ/132/999
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- We present an algorithm for selecting a uniform sample of gravitationally lensed quasar candidates from low-redshift (0.6<z<2.2) quasars brighter than i=19.1 that have been spectroscopically identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Our algorithm uses morphological and color selections that are intended to identify small- and large-separation lenses, respectively. Our selection algorithm only relies on parameters that the SDSS standard image processing pipeline generates, allowing easy and fast selection of lens candidates. The algorithm has been tested against simulated SDSS images, which adopt distributions of field and quasar parameters taken from the real SDSS data as input. Furthermore, we take differential reddening into account. We find that our selection algorithm is almost complete down to separations of 1" and flux ratios of 10^-0.5^.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/135/496
- Title:
- SDSS quasar lens search. II.
- Short Name:
- J/AJ/135/496
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- We report the first results of our systematic search for strongly lensed quasars using the spectroscopically confirmed quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Among 46420 quasars from the SDSS Data Release 3 (~4188deg^2^), we select a subsample of 22683 quasars that are located at redshifts between 0.6 and 2.2 and are brighter than the Galactic extinction-corrected i-band magnitude of 19.1. We identify 220 lens candidates from the quasar subsample, for which we conduct extensive and systematic follow-up observations in optical and near-infrared wavebands, in order to construct a complete lensed quasar sample at image separations between 1" and 20" and flux ratios of faint to bright lensed images larger than 10^-0.5^. We construct a statistical sample of 11 lensed quasars. Ten of these are galaxy-scale lenses with small image separations (~1"-2") and one is a large separation (15") system which is produced by a massive cluster of galaxies, representing the first statistical sample of lensed quasars including both galaxy- and cluster-scale lenses. The Data Release 3 spectroscopic quasars contain an additional 11 lensed quasars outside the statistical sample.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/140/403
- Title:
- SDSS Quasar Lens Search. IV.
- Short Name:
- J/AJ/140/403
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- We present the second report of our systematic search for strongly lensed quasars from the data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). From extensive follow-up observations of 136 candidate objects, we find 36 lenses in the full sample of 77,429 spectroscopically confirmed quasars in the SDSS Data Release 5.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/143/119
- Title:
- SDSS Quasar Lens Search. V. Final catalog
- Short Name:
- J/AJ/143/119
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- We present the final statistical sample of lensed quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Quasar Lens Search (SQLS). The well-defined statistical lens sample consists of 26 lensed quasars brighter than i=19.1 and in the redshift range of 0.6<z<2.2 selected from 50826 spectroscopically confirmed quasars in the SDSS Data Release 7 (DR7), where we restrict the image separation range to 1"<{theta}<20" and the i-band magnitude differences in two images to be smaller than 1.25mag. The SDSS-DR7 quasar catalog also contains 36 additional lenses identified with various techniques. In addition to these lensed quasars, we have identified 81 pairs of quasars from follow-up spectroscopy, 26 of which are physically associated binary quasars. The statistical lens sample covers a wide range of image separations, redshifts, and magnitudes, and therefore is suitable for systematic studies of cosmological parameters and surveys of the structure and evolution of galaxies and quasars.
- ID:
- ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/A+A/585/A84
- Title:
- Shape parameters of lensing galaxies
- Short Name:
- J/A+A/585/A84
- Date:
- 21 Oct 2021
- Publisher:
- CDS
- Description:
- The luminosity profiles of galaxies acting as strong gravitational lenses can be tricky to study. Indeed, strong gravitational lensing images display several lensed components, both point-like and diffuse, around the lensing galaxy. Those objects limit the study of the galaxy luminosity to its inner parts. Therefore, the usual fitting methods perform rather badly on such images. Previous studies of strong lenses luminosity profiles using software such as like GALFIT or IMFITFITS and various PSF-determining methods have resulted in somewhat discrepant results. The present work aims at investigating the causes of those discrepancies, as well as at designing more robust techniques for studying the morphology of early-type lensing galaxies with the ability to subtract a lensed signal from their luminosity profiles. The morphology of early-type lensing galaxies with the ability to subtract a lensed signal from their luminosity profiles. Methods. We design a new method to independently measure each shape parameter, namely, the position angle, ellipticity, and half- light radius of the galaxy. Our half-light radius measurement method is based on an innovative scheme for computing isophotes that is well suited to measuring the morphological properties of gravitational lensing galaxies. Its robustness regarding various specific aspects of gravitational lensing image processing is analysed and tested against GALFIT. It is then applied to a sample of systems from the CASTLES database.