Related papers: The impact of lens galaxy environments on the imag…
Using new photometric and spectroscopic data in the fields of nine strong gravitational lenses that lie in galaxy groups, we analyze the effects of both the local group environment and line-of-sight galaxies on the lens potential. We use…
We study the gravitational lensing of high-redshift sources in a LCDM universe. We have performed a series of ray-tracing experiments, and selected a subsample of cases of strong lensing (multiple images, arcs, and Einstein rings). For each…
We predict how the observed variations in galaxy populations with environment affect the number and properties of gravitational lenses in different environments. Two trends dominate: lensing strongly favors early-type galaxies, which tend…
We use publicly available N-body simulations and semi-analytic models of galaxy formation to estimate the levels of external shear due to structure near the lens in gravitational lens systems. We also describe two selection effects,…
Gravitational lensing causes a correlation between a population of foreground large-scale structures and the observed number density of the background distant galaxies as a consequence of the flux magnification and the lensing area…
Weak lensing can be observed through a number of effects on the images of distant galaxies; their shapes are sheared, their sizes and fluxes (magnitudes) are magnified and their positions on the sky are modified by the lensing field. Galaxy…
A large fraction of known galaxy-lens systems require a component of external shear to explain the observed image geometries. In most cases, this shear can be attributed to a nearby group of galaxies. We discuss how the dark-matter mass…
Strong lensing by massive galaxies probes their mass distribution, thus providing a window to study their internal structure, i.e., the distributions of luminous and dark matter. In this paper, we investigate the relation between the…
Using measured tangential shear profiles and number counts of massive elliptical galaxies, the halo occupation distribution of strong lensing galaxies is constrained. The resulting HOD is then used to populate an N-body simulation with lens…
Matter near a gravitational lens galaxy or projected along the line of sight (LOS) can affect strong lensing observables by more than contemporary measurement errors. We simulate lens fields with realistic three-dimensional mass…
The upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will dramatically increase the number of strong gravitational lensing systems, requiring precise modeling of line-of-sight (LOS) effects to mitigate biases in…
In this paper, we study gravitational lensing by groups of galaxies. Since groups are abundant and therefore have a large covering fraction on the sky, lensing by groups is likely to be very important observationally. Besides, it has…
We study the effects of ellipticity in lens galaxies and external tidal shear from neighboring objects on the statistics of strong gravitational lenses. For isothermal lens galaxies normalized so that the Einstein radius is independent of…
We study the effects of large-scale density fluctuations on strong gravitational lensing. Previous studies have focused mostly on weak lensing, since large-scale structure alone cannot produce multiple images. When a galaxy or cluster acts…
The associations of the angular positions of background quasars with foreground galaxies, clusters of galaxies and quasars are often attributed to the statistical lensing by gravitational potentials of the matter along the lines of sight,…
Increasingly large areas in cosmic shear surveys lead to a reduction of statistical errors, necessitating to control systematic errors increasingly better. One of these systematic effects was initially studied by Hartlap et al. in 2011,…
Only galaxies bright enough and large enough to be unambiguously identified and measured are included in galaxy surveys used to estimate cosmic shear. We demonstrate that because gravitational lensing can scatter galaxies across the…
The distribution function of quasars with respect to apparent brightness is given, found under the assumption that quasars are, at least partially, the gravitationally enhanced images of the active nuclei of distant galaxies. A Schechter…
Gravitational lensing of a quasar by a spiral galaxy should often be accompanied by damped Lyman-alpha absorption and dust extinction due to the intervening gaseous disk. In nearly edge-on configurations, the surface mass density of the gas…
Among the 100 strong lens candidates found in the COSMOS field, 20 with redshifts in the range [0.34,1.13], feature multiple images of background sources. Using the multi-wavelength coverage of the field and its spectroscopic follow-up, we…