The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Lens Search. II. Statistical Lens Sample from the Third Data Release
Abstract
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 46,420 quasars from the SDSS Data Release 3 (~4188 deg^2), we select a subsample of 22,683 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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0708.0828,
title = {The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Lens Search. II. Statistical Lens Sample from the Third Data Release},
author = {Naohisa Inada and Masamune Oguri and Robert H. Becker and Min-Su Shin and Gordon T. Richards and Joseph F. Hennawi and Richard L. White and Bartosz Pindor and Michael A. Strauss and Christopher S. Kochanek and David E. Johnston and Michael D. Gregg and Issha Kayo and Daniel Eisenstein and Patrick B. Hall and Francisco J. Castander and Alejandro Clocchiatti and Scott F. Anderson and Donald P. Schneider and Donald G. York and Robert Lupton and Kuenley Chiu and Yozo Kawano and Ryan Scranton and Joshua A. Frieman and Charles R. Keeton and Tomoki Morokuma and Hans-Walter Rix and Edwin L. Turner and Scott Burles and Robert J. Brunner and Erin Scott Sheldon and Neta A. Bahcall and Masataka Fukugita},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0708.0828},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
15 pages, 4 figures, 5 tables, accepted for publication in AJ; see http://www-utap.phys.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~sdss/sqls/ for supplemental information