Related papers: Galaxy mass profiles from strong lensing II: The e…
In this series of papers we develop a formalism for constraining mass profiles in strong gravitational lenses with extended images, using fluxes in addition to positional information. We start in this paper with a circular power-law profile…
We use 118 strong gravitational lenses observed by the SLACS, BELLS, LSD and SL2S surveys to constrain the total mass profile and the profile of luminosity density of stars (light-tracers) in elliptical galaxies up to redshift $z \sim 1$.…
We use the statistics of strong gravitational lensing from the CLASS survey to impose constraints on the velocity dispersion and density profile of elliptical galaxies. This approach differs from much recent work, where the luminosity…
When modelling strong gravitational lenses, i.e., where there are multiple images of the same source, the most widely used parameterisation for the mass profile in the lens galaxy is the singular power-law model $\rho(r)\propto…
The mass distribution in massive elliptical galaxies encodes their evolutionary history, thus providing an avenue to constrain the baryonic astrophysics in their evolution. The power-law assumption for the radial mass profile in ellipticals…
By comparing the dynamical and lensing masses of early-type lens galaxies, one can constrain both the cosmological parameters and the density profiles of galaxies. We explore the constraining power on cosmological parameters and the effect…
We have worked out simple analytical formulae that accurately approximate the relationship between the position of the source with respect to the lens center and the amplification of the images, hence the lens cross section, for realistic…
We present a systematic study of the internal mass structure of early-type galaxies (ETGs) based on 106 galaxy-scale strong gravitational lenses with background quasars, all having spectroscopic redshifts. From this parent sample, we select…
We study the correlation between the locations of galaxy-galaxy strong lensing candidates and tracers of large-scale structure from both weak lensing or X-ray emission. The COSMOS survey is a unique data set, combining deep, high resolution…
The large-scale mass distributions of galaxy-scale strong lenses have long been assumed to be well-described by a singular ellipsoidal power-law density profile with external shear. However, the inflexibility of this model could lead to…
Weak lensing by large scale structure induces correlated ellipticities in the images of distant galaxies. The two-point correlation is determined by the matter power spectrum along the line of sight. We use the fully nonlinear evolution of…
Precise modelling of strong lensing systems can be affected by external mass distributions, e.g. the group or cluster within which the lens is embedded. In this article, we propose to turn this limitation to our advantage and to use precise…
We impose the first strong-lensing constraints on a wide class of modified gravity models where an extra field that modifies gravity also couples to photons (either directly or indirectly through a coupling with baryons) and thus modifies…
We analyse newly obtained Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging for two nearby strong lensing elliptical galaxies, SNL-1 (z = 0.03) and SNL-2 (z = 0.05), in order to improve the lensing mass constraints. The imaging reveals previously unseen…
Most gravitational lens systems consist of two or four observable images. The absence of detectable odd images allows us to place a lower limit on the power-law slope of the inner mass profile of lensing galaxies. Using a sample of six…
We investigate the mass structure of a strong gravitational lens galaxy at $z=0.350$, taking advantage of the milli-arcsecond (mas) angular resolution of very long baseline interferometric (VLBI) observations. In the first analysis of its…
Studies of strong gravitational lensing in current and upcoming wide and deep photometric surveys, and of stellar kinematics from (integral-field) spectroscopy at increasing redshifts, promise to provide valuable constraints on galaxy…
The elliptical power-law (EPL) model of the mass in a galaxy is widely used in strong gravitational lensing analyses. However, the distribution of mass in real galaxies is more complex. We quantify the biases due to this model mismatch by…
We have previously reported the discovery of strong gravitational lensing by faint elliptical galaxies using the WFPC2 on HST and here we investigate their potential usefulness in putting constraints on lens mass models. We compare various…
[Abridged] Many current and future astronomical surveys will rely on samples of strong gravitational lens systems to draw conclusions about galaxy mass distributions. We use a new strong lensing pipeline (presented in Paper I of this…