English

TDCOSMO 2025: Cosmological constraints from strong lensing time delays

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2026-01-14 v4

Abstract

We present cosmological constraints from 8 strongly lensed quasars (hereafter, the TDCOSMO-2025 sample). Building on previous work, our analysis incorporated new deflector stellar velocity dispersions measured from spectra obtained with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Keck Telescopes, and the Very Large Telescope (VLT), utilizing improved methods. We used integrated JWST stellar kinematics for 5 lenses, VLT-MUSE for 2, and resolved kinematics from Keck and JWST for RXJ1131-1231. We also considered two samples of non-time-delay lenses: 11 from the Sloan Lens ACS (SLACS) sample with Keck-KCWI resolved kinematics; and 4 from the Strong Lenses in the Legacy Survey (SL2S) sample. We improved our analysis of line-of-sight effects, the surface brightness profile of the lens galaxies, and orbital anisotropy, and corrected for projection effects in the dynamics. Our uncertainties are maximally conservative by accounting for the mass-sheet degeneracy in the deflectors' mass density profiles. The analysis was blinded to prevent experimenter bias. Our primary result is based on the TDCOSMO-2025 sample, in combination with Ωm\Omega_{\rm m} constraints from the Pantheon+ Type Ia supernovae (SN) dataset. In the flat Λ\Lambda cold dark matter (CDM), we find H0=71.63.3+3.9H_0=71.6^{+3.9}_{-3.3} km s1^{-1} Mpc1^{-1}. The SLACS and SL2S samples are in excellent agreement with the TDCOSMO-2025 sample, improving the precision on H0H_0 in flat Λ\LambdaCDM to 4.6%. Using the Dark Energy Survey SN Year-5 dataset (DES-SN5YR) or DESI-DR2 baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) likelihoods instead of Pantheon+ yields very similar results. We also present constraints in the open Λ\LambdaCDM, wwCDM, w0waw_0w_aCDM, and wϕw_{\phi}CDM cosmologies. The TDCOSMO H0H_0 inference is robust and consistent across all presented cosmological models, and our cosmological constraints in them agree with those from the BAO and SN.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.03023,
  title  = {TDCOSMO 2025: Cosmological constraints from strong lensing time delays},
  author = {TDCOSMO Collaboration and Simon Birrer and Elizabeth J. Buckley-Geer and Michele Cappellari and Frédéric Courbin and Frédéric Dux and Christopher D. Fassnacht and Joshua A. Frieman and Aymeric Galan and Daniel Gilman and Xiang-Yu Huang and Shawn Knabel and Danial Langeroodi and Huan Lin and Martin Millon and Takahiro Morishita and Veronica Motta and Pritom Mozumdar and Eric Paic and Anowar J. Shajib and William Sheu and Dominique Sluse and Alessandro Sonnenfeld and Chiara Spiniello and Massimo Stiavelli and Sherry H. Suyu and Chin Yi Tan and Tommaso Treu and Lyne Van de Vyvere and Han Wang and Patrick Wells and Devon M. Williams and Kenneth C. Wong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.03023},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

35 pages, 17 figures, 8 tables (this version: published version in A&A). The CosmoVerse Seminar on this paper given on June 12, 2025 can be watched at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr0Ft6O4VBg