English

Strong Chromatic Microlensing in HE0047-1756 and SDSS1155+6346

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2015-06-23 v1

Abstract

We use spectra of the double lensed quasars HE0047-1756 and SDSS1155+6346 to study their unresolved structure through the impact of microlensing. There is no significant evidence of microlensing in the emission line profiles except for the Lyα\alpha line of SDSS1155+6346, which shows strong differences in the shapes for images A and B. However, the continuum of the B image spectrum in SDSS1155+6346 is strongly contaminated by the lens galaxy and these differences should be considered with caution. Using the flux ratios of the emission lines for image pairs as a baseline to remove macro-magnification and extinction, we have detected strong chromatic microlensing in the continuum measured by CASTLES (http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/castles/), in both lens systems, with amplitudes 0.09(λ16000)Δm0.8(λ5439)0.09 (\lambda 16000) \lesssim |\Delta m |\lesssim 0.8 (\lambda 5439) for HE0047-1756, and 0.2(λ16000)Δm0.8(λ5439)0.2 (\lambda 16000) \lesssim |\Delta m |\lesssim 0.8 (\lambda 5439) for SDSS1155+6346. Using magnification maps to simulate microlensing, and modeling the accretion disk as a Gaussian source (I \propto exp(-R2^{2}/2rs2^2_s)) of size rs_{s} \propto λp \lambda^{p} we find, rs_{s} = 2.51.4+3.0_{-1.4}^{+3.0} M/0.3M\sqrt{M/0.3M_{\odot}} light days and p = 2.3 ±\pm 0.8, at the rest frame for λ\lambda = 2045, for HE0047-1756 (log prior), and rs_{s} = 5.53.3+8.2_{-3.3}^{+8.2} M/0.3M\sqrt{M/0.3M_{\odot}} light days and p = 1.5 ±\pm 0.6 at the rest frame of λ\lambda = 1398, for SDSS1155+6346 (log prior). Contrary to other studied lens systems, the chromaticity detected in HE0047-1756 and SDSS1155+6346 is large enough to fulfill the thin disk prediction. The inferred sizes, however, are very large compared to the predictions of this model, especially in the case of SDSS1155+6346.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1409.8246,
  title  = {Strong Chromatic Microlensing in HE0047-1756 and SDSS1155+6346},
  author = {Karina Rojas and Verónica Motta and Evencio Mediavilla and Emilio Falco and Jorge Jiménez-Vicente and José Antonio Muñoz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.8246},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

31 pages, 7 figures, 7 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJ