Related papers: Substructure and the Cusp and Fold Relations
[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…
Many distant objects can only be detected, or become more scientifically valuable, if they have been highly magnified by strong gravitational lensing. We use EAGLE and BAHAMAS, two recent cosmological hydrodynamical simulations, to predict…
We extend the model-independent approach to characterise strong gravitational lenses of Wagner & Bartelmann (2016) to its most general form to leading order by using the orientation angles of a set of multiple images with respect to their…
We study the gravitational lensing in the weak field approximation assuming the presence of a plasma and of a magnetic field around a compact gravitational source. The external magnetic field causes the split of the image, as the…
We report the discovery of a 'folded' gravitationally lensed image, 'Hamilton's Object', found in a HST image of the field near the AGN SDSS J223010.47-081017.8 ($z=0.62$). The lensed images are sourced by a galaxy at a spectroscopic…
Lensing flux-ratio anomalies have been frequently observed and taken as evidence for the presence of abundant dark matter substructures in lensing galaxies, as predicted by the cold dark matter (CDM) model of cosmogony. In previous work, we…
We present a rigorous, detailed study of the generic, quantitative properties of gravitational microlensing near cusp catastrophes. We derive explicit formulas for the total magnification and centroid of the images created for sources…
Gravitational lensing can amplify the apparent brightness of distant sources. Images that are highly magnified are often part of multiply-imaged systems, but we consider the possibility of having large magnifications without additional…
We compute the fluctuations in gravitational lens image positions and time delay caused by large scale structure correlations. We show that these fluctuations can be expressed as a simple integral over the density power spectrum. Using the…
A galaxy can act as a gravitational lens, producing multiple images of a background object. Theory predicts there should be an odd number of images but, paradoxically, almost all observed lenses have 2 or 4 images. The missing image should…
The analysis of strong lensing images usually involves an external convergence and shear, which are meant to model the effect of perturbations along the line of sight, on top of the main lens. Such a description of line-of-sight…
We present high-resolution mass reconstructions for five massive cluster-lenses spanning a redshift range from $z = 0.18$--0.57 utilising archival {\it Hubble Space Telescope} ({\it HST}) data and applying galaxy-galaxy lensing techniques.…
Weak gravitational lensing on a cosmological scales can provide strong constraints both on the nature of dark matter and the dark energy equation of state. Most current weak lensing studies are restricted to (two-dimensional) projections,…
Lensing in the context of rich clusters is normally quantified from small image distortions, yielding a relative mass distribution in the limit of weak lensing. Here we show the magnification effect of lensing can also be mapped over a…
A long standing question in cosmology is whether gravitational lensing changes the distance-redshift relation $D(z)$ or the mean flux density of sources. Interest in this has been rekindled by recent studies in non-linear relativistic…
We investigate the effects of numerous dark matter subhalos in a galaxy-sized halo on the events of strong lensing, to assess their presence as expected from the cold dark matter scenario. Lens galaxies are represented by a smooth ellipsoid…
Context. Strong lenses are a biased subset of the general population of galaxies. Aims. The goal of this work is to quantify how lens galaxies and lensed sources differ from their parent distribution, namely the strong lensing bias.…
Like light, gravitational waves can be gravitationally lensed by massive astrophysical objects. Strong gravitational lensing by galaxies and galaxy clusters is anticipated to become observable in the coming years. This phenomenon will…
Over the past decade advancements in the understanding of several astrophysical phenomena have allowed us to infer a concordance cosmological model that successfully accounts for most of the observations of our universe. This has opened up…
We report on an investigation of the environments of the SLACS sample of gravitational lenses. The local and global environments of the lenses are characterized using SDSS photometry and, when available, spectroscopy. We find that the lens…