Related papers: A New Survey for Giant Arcs
Strong gravitational lensing by clusters of galaxies probes the mass distribution at the core of each cluster and magnifies the universe behind it. MACS J0417.5-1154 at z=0.443 is one of the most massive clusters known based on weak…
Bright galaxy-galaxy strong lenses are much more powerful than lensed quasars for measuring the mass profiles of galaxies, but until this year only a handful have been known. Here we present five new examples, identified via the optimal…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will provide a complete imaging and spectroscopic survey of the high-latitude northern sky. The 2D survey will image the sky in five colors and will contain nearly 5 x 107 galaxies to g ~ 23m. The…
We present an axially symmetric formula to calculate the probability of finding gravitational arcs in galaxy clusters, being induced by their massive dark matter haloes, as a function of clusters redshifts and virial masses. The formula…
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…
We present a search for gravitational arcs in a sample of X-ray luminous, medium redshift clusters of galaxies. The sample of clusters is called ARCRAIDER, is based on the ROSAT Bright Survey (RBS) and fulfills the following criteria: (a)…
Spectroscopic surveys of massive galaxy clusters reveal the properties of faint background galaxies, thanks to the magnification provided by strong gravitational lensing. We present a systematic analysis of integral-field-spectroscopy…
We report the discovery of four very bright, strongly-lensed galaxies found via systematic searches for arcs in Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5 and 6. These were followed-up with spectroscopy and imaging data from the Astrophysical…
Strong gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters magnifies background galaxies, enhancing our ability to discover statistically significant samples of galaxies at z>6, in order to constrain the high-redshift galaxy luminosity functions.…
The Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH) is a 524-orbit multi-cycle treasury program to use the gravitational lensing properties of 25 galaxy clusters to accurately constrain their mass distributions. The survey,…
Many strong gravitational lenses lie in complex environments, such as poor groups of galaxies, that significantly bias conclusions from lens analyses. We are undertaking a photometric survey of all known galaxy-mass strong lenses to…
We present a catalog of 105 rich and massive ($M>3\times10^{14}M_{\sun}$) optically-selected clusters of galaxies extracted from 70 square-degrees of public archival griz imaging from the Blanco 4-m telescope acquired over 45 nights between…
We report the discovery and spectroscopic confirmation of three gravitationally-lensed images of a galaxy at z=3.9 in the background of a distant, rich cluster of galaxies at z=0.83, on the basis of observations with Faint Object Camera And…
We report new high-quality galaxy scale strong lens candidates found in the Kilo Degree Survey data release 4 using Machine Learning. We have developed a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier to search for gravitational arcs,…
Strong gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters has become a powerful tool for probing the high-redshift Universe, magnifying distant and faint background galaxies. Reliable strong lensing (SL) models are crucial for determining the…
The advent of new observational facilities in the last two decades has allowed the rapid discovery and high-resolution optical imaging of many strong lens systems from galaxy to cluster scales, as well as their spectroscopic follow-up.…
Large surveys of galaxy clusters with the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, including CLASH and the Frontier Fields, have demonstrated the power of strong gravitational lensing to efficiently deliver large samples of high-redshift…
We apply a novel model based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to identify gravitationally-lensed galaxies in multi-band imaging of the Hyper Suprime Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP) Survey. The trained model is applied to a…
The Red-Sequence Cluster Survey (RCS) is a 100 deg^2 galaxy cluster survey designed to provide a large sample of optically selected clusters of galaxies with redshifts 0.1<z<1.4. The survey data are also useful for a variety of lensing…
We present the results of a systematic search for gravitationally-lensed arcs in clusters of galaxies located in the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 data archive. By carefully examining the images of 128 clusters we…