Related papers: Lensing degeneracies and mass substructure
The inversion of a gravitational lens system is, as is well known, plagued by the so-called mass-sheet degeneracy: one can always rescale the density distribution of the lens and add a constant-density mass-sheet such that the, also…
Weak gravitational lensing is considered to be one of the most powerful tools to study the mass and the mass distribution of galaxy clusters. However, weak lensing mass reconstructions are plagued by the so-called mass-sheet degeneracy--the…
Weak gravitational lensing is considered to be one of the most powerful tools to study the mass and the mass distribution of galaxy clusters. However, weak lensing mass reconstructions are plagued by the so-called mass-sheet degeneracy--the…
This paper shows that the mass-sheet degeneracy and other degeneracies in lensing have simple geometrical interpretations: they are mostly rescalings of the arrival-time surface. Different degeneracies appear in Local Group lensing and in…
Strong gravitational lensing has to deal with many modeling degeneracies, the most notable being the Mass Sheet Degeneracy (MSD). We review the MSD when one needs to model more lens planes, each one with an internal mass sheet. We take into…
We make a number of comments regarding modeling degeneracies in strong lensing measurements of the Hubble parameter $H_0$. The first point concerns the impact of weak lensing associated with different segments of the line of sight. We show…
The main obstacle for gravitational lensing to determine accurate masses of deflectors, or to determine precise estimates for the Hubble constant, is the degeneracy of lensing observables with respect to the mass-sheet transformation (MST).…
The lensing information provided by multiple images, arclets, and statistical distortions can all be formulated as linear constraints on the arrival-time surface, and hence on the mass distribution. This reduces cluster lens reconstruction…
The mass-sheet degeneracy is a well-known problem in gravitational lensing which limits our capability to infer astrophysical lens properties or cosmological parameters from observations. As the number of gravitational wave observations…
Based on the standard gravitational lensing formalism with its effective, projected lensing potential in a given background cosmology, we investigate under which transformations of the source position and of the deflection angle the…
Weak gravitational lensing is considered to be one of the most powerful tools to study the mass and the mass distribution of galaxy clusters. However, the mass-sheet degeneracy transformation has limited its success. We present a novel…
The increasingly large numbers of multiple images in cluster-scale gravitational lenses have allowed for tighter constraints on the mass distributions of these systems. Most lens models have progressed alongside this increase in image…
We present the analysis of a sample of twenty-four SLACS-like galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lens systems with a background source and deflectors from the Illustris-1 simulation. We study the degeneracy between the complex mass…
Strong gravitational lensing is regarded as the most precise technique to measure the mass in the inner region of galaxies or galaxy clusters. In particular, the mass within one Einstein radius can be determined with an accuracy of order of…
The light travel time differences in strong gravitational lensing systems allows an independent determination of the Hubble constant. This method has been successfully applied to several lens systems. The formally most precise measurements…
The cluster lens Cl 0024+1654 is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful examples of strong gravitational lensing, providing five large images of a single source with well-resolved substructure. Using the information contained in the…
In a series of previous papers we have considered the reconstruction of the surface mass density of a cluster of galaxies from images of lensed faint background galaxies. We showed that the reconstructed surface mass density is not uniquely…
When light from a distant source object, like a galaxy or a supernova, travels towards us, it is deflected by massive objects that lie on its path. When the mass density of the deflecting object exceeds a certain threshold, multiple, highly…
Gravitational and plasma lensing share the same mathematical formalism in the limit of geometrical optics. Both phenomena can be effectively described by a projected, two-dimensional deflection potential whose gradient causes an…
We give a physical interpretation of the formalism intrinsic degeneracies of the gravitational lensing formalism that we derived on a mathematical basis in part IV of this series. We find that all degeneracies occur due to the partition of…