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Register a new userEasyCritics II. Testing its efficiency: new gravitational lens candidates in CFHTLenS
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Mauricio Carrasco Dr
Publication date
2018
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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We report the results of $EasyCritics$, a fully automated algorithm for the efficient search of strong-lensing (SL) regions in wide-field surveys, applied to the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS). By using only the photometric information of the brightest elliptical galaxies distributed over a wide redshift range ($smash{0.2 lesssim z lesssim 0.9}$) and without requiring the identification of arcs, our algorithm produces lensing potential models and catalogs of critical curves of the entire survey area. We explore several parameter set configurations in order to test the efficiency of our approach. In a specific configuration, $EasyCritics$ generates only $sim1200$ possibly super-critical regions in the CFHTLS area, drastically reducing the effective area for inspection from $154$ sq. deg to $sim0.623$ sq. deg, $i.e.$ by more than two orders of magnitude. Among the pre-selected SL regions, we identify 32 of the 44 previously known lenses on the group and cluster scale, and discover 9 new promising lens candidates. The detection rate can be easily improved to $sim82%$ by a simple modification in the parameter set, but at the expense of increasing the total number of possible SL candidates. Note that $EasyCritics$ is fully complementary to other arc-finders since we characterize lenses instead of directly identifying arcs. Although future comparisons against numerical simulations are required for fully assessing the efficiency of $EasyCritics$, the algorithm seems very promising for upcoming surveys covering $smash{10^{4}}$ sq. deg, such as the $Euclid$ mission and $LSST$, where the pre-selection of candidates for any kind of SL analysis will be indispensable due to the expected enormous data volume.
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We report the discovery of 29 promising (and 59 total) new lens candidates from the CFHT Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) based on about 11 million classifications performed by citizen scientists as part of the first Space Warps lens search. The goal of the blind lens search was to identify lens candidates missed by robots (the RingFinder on galaxy scales and ArcFinder on group/cluster scales) which had been previously used to mine the CFHTLS for lenses. We compare some properties of the samples detected by these algorithms to the Space Warps sample and find them to be broadly similar. The image separation distribution calculated from the Space Warps sample shows that previous constraints on the average density profile of lens galaxies are robust. SpaceWarps recovers about 65% of known lenses, while the new candidates show a richer variety compared to those found by the two robots. This detection rate could be increased to 80% by only using classifications performed by expert volunteers (albeit at the cost of a lower purity), indicating that the training and performance calibration of the citizen scientists is very important for the success of Space Warps. In this work we present the SIMCT pipeline, used for generating in situ a sample of realistic simulated lensed images. This training sample, along with the false positives identified during the search, has a legacy value for testing future lens finding algorithms. We make the pipeline and the training set publicly available.
We report ten lens candidates in the E-CDFS from the GEMS survey. Nine of the systems are new detections and only one of the candidates is a known lens system. For the most promising five systems including the known lens system, we present results from preliminary lens mass modelling, which tests if the candidates are plausible lens systems. Photometric redshifts of the candidate lens galaxies are obtained from the COMBO-17 galaxy catalog. Stellar masses of the candidate lens galaxies within the Einstein radius are obtained by using the $z$-band luminosity and the $V-z$ color-based stellar mass-to-light ratios. As expected, the lensing masses are found to be larger than the stellar masses of the candidate lens galaxies. These candidates have similar dark matter fractions as compared to lenses in SLACS and COSMOS. They also roughly follow the halo mass-stellar mass relation predicted by the subhalo abundance matching technique. One of the candidate lens galaxies qualifies as a LIRG and may not be a true lens because the arc-like feature in the system is likely to be an active region of star formation in the candidate lens galaxy. Amongst the five best candidates, one is a confirmed lens system, one is a likely lens system, two are less likely to be lenses and the status of one of the candidates is ambiguous. Spectroscopic follow-up of these systems is still required to confirm lensing and/or for more accurate determination of the lens masses and mass density profiles.
Context. Strong gravitationally lensed quasars are among the most interesting and useful observable extragalactic phenomena. Because their study constitutes a unique tool in various fields of astronomy, they are highly sought, not without difficulty. Indeed, even in this era of all-sky surveys, their recognition remains a great challenge, with barely a few hundred currently known systems. Aims. In this work we aim to detect new strongly lensed quasar candidates in the recently published Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2), which is the highest spatial resolution astrometric and photometric all-sky survey, attaining effective resolutions from 0.4 to 2.2. Methods. We cross-matched a merged list of quasars and candidates with the Gaia DR2 and found 1,839,143 counterparts within 0.5. We then searched matches with more than two Gaia DR2 counterparts within 6. We further narrowed the resulting list using astrometry and photometry compatibility criteria between the Gaia DR2 counterparts. A supervised machine learning method, Extremely Randomized Trees, is finally adopted to assign to each remaining system a probability of being lensed. Results. We report the discovery of three quadruply-imaged quasar candidates that are fully detected in Gaia DR2. These are the most promising new quasar lens candidates from Gaia DR2 and a simple singular isothermal ellipsoid lens model is able to reproduce their image positions to within $sim$1 mas. This letter demonstrates the gravitational lens discovery potential of Gaia.
The positions of images produced by the gravitational lensing of background sources provide unique insight in to galaxy-lens mass distribution. However, even quad images of extended sources are not able to fully characterize the central regions of the host galaxy. Most previous work has focused either on the radial density profile of the lenses or localized substructure clumps. Here, we concentrate on the azimuthal mass asymmetries near the image circle. The motivation for considering such mass inhomogeneities is that the transition between the central stellar dominated region and the outer dark matter dominated region, though well represented by a power law density profile, is unlikely to be featureless, and encodes information about the dynamical state and assembly history of galaxies. It also happens to roughly coincide with the Einstein radius. We ask if galaxies that have mass asymmetries beyond ellipticity can be modeled with simpler lenses, i.e., can complex mass distributions masquerade as simple elliptical+shear lenses? Our preliminary study indicates that for galaxies with elliptical stellar and dark matter distributions, but with no mass asymmetry, and an extended source filling the diamond caustic, an elliptical+shear lens model can reproduce the images well, thereby hiding the potential complexity of the actual mass distribution. For galaxies with non-zero mass asymmetry, the answer depends on the size and brightness distribution of the source, and its location within the diamond caustic. In roughly half of the cases we considered the mass asymmetries can easily evade detection.
We present results from a systematic search for strong gravitational lenses in the GOODS ACS data. The search technique involves creating a sample of likely lensing galaxies, which we define as massive early-type galaxies in a redshift range 0.3 < z <1.3. The target galaxies are selected by color and magnitude, giving a sample of 1092 galaxies. For each galaxy in the sample, we subtract a smooth description of the galaxy light from the z_{850}-band data. The residuals are examined, along with true-color images created from the B_{435}V_{606}i_{775} data, for morphologies indicative of strong lensing. We present our six most promising lens candidates, as well as our full list of candidates.
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