Related papers: Do Quasars Lens Quasars?
The absence of any wide-separation gravitational lenses in the Large Bright Quasar Survey is used to place limits on the population of cluster-sized halos in the universe, and hence constrain a number of cosmological parameters. The results…
We report the discovery of a z=2.65 low-ionization iron broad absorption line quasar, FIRST J100424.9+122922, which is gravitationally-lensed by a galaxy at z~0.95. The object was discovered as part of a program to find very red quasars by…
LISA might detect gravitational waves from mergers of massive black hole binaries strongly lensed by intervening galaxies (Sereno et al. 2010). The detection of multiple gravitational lensing events would provide a new tool for cosmography.…
Interacting quasar pairs (QPs, either dual or binary) provide crucial insights into galaxy mergers, black hole growth, and large-scale structure formation. The current literature reports fewer than 200 spectroscopically confirmed QPs,…
We report the discovery of a new gravitationally lensed quasar, SDSS J131339.98+515128.3, at a redshift of 1.875 with an image separation of 1.24". The lensing galaxy is clearly detected in visible-light follow-up observations. We also…
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…
{}From deep optical images of three clusters selected by virtue of their X-ray luminosity and/or optical richness (1455+22; $z=0.26$, 0016+16; $z=0.55$ and 1603+43; $z=0.89$), we construct statistically-complete samples of faint field…
Several recent studies show that bright, intermediate and high redshift optically and radio selected QSOs are positively correlated with nearby galaxies on a range of angular scales up to a degree. Obscuration by unevenly distributed…
We report the discovery of a new gravitationally lensed quasar from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, SDSS J090334.92+502819.2. This object was targeted for SDSS spectroscopy as a Luminous Red Galaxy (LRG), but manual examination of the…
We identify a third image in the unique quasar lens SDSS J1029+2623, the second known quasar lens produced by a massive cluster of galaxies. The spectrum of the third image shows similar emission and absorption features, but has a redder…
Gravitational microlensing is a powerful tool for probing the physical properties of quasar accretion disks and properties of the lens galaxy such as its dark matter fraction and mean stellar mass. Unfortunately the number of lensed quasars…
In this paper we present new ESO/VLT FORS1 and ISAAC images of the fields around eight gravitationally lensed quasars: CTQ414, HE0230-2130, LBQS1009-0252, B1030+074, HE1104-1805, B1359+154, H1413+117 and HE2149-2745. When available and deep…
We present an analysis of seven strongly gravitationally lensed quasars and the corresponding constraints on the properties of dark matter. Our results are derived by modelling the lensed image positions and flux-ratios using a combination…
We present the first galaxy scale lens catalog from the second Red-Sequence Cluster Survey. The catalog contains 60 lensing system candidates comprised of Luminous Red Galaxy (LRG) lenses at 0.2 < z < 0.5 surrounded by blue arcs or apparent…
We study the dependence of the number density and properties of quasars on the background galaxy density using the currently largest spectroscopic datasets of quasars and galaxies. We construct a galaxy number density field smoothed over…
While many strong gravitational lens galaxies are suspected to lie in groups or clusters of galaxies, environmental effects in lens models are often unconstrained and sometimes ignored. We show that this creates significant biases in a…
We present spectroscopic observations of six optical counterparts of intermediate luminosity X-ray sources (ULXs) around nearby galaxies. The spectra of the six objects show the presence of broad emission features. The identification of…
We report the discovery of a unique gravitational lens system, SDSSJ2222+2745, producing five spectroscopically confirmed images of a z_s=2.82 quasar lensed by a foreground galaxy cluster at z_l=0.49. We also present photometric and…
We test the hypothesis whether high redshift QSOs would preferentially appear in small groups or pairs, and if they are associated with massive, young clusters. We carried out a photometric search for \Ly emitters on scales $\lesssim 10…
We argue that globular clusters (GCs) are good candidates for gravitational lenses in explaining quasar-galaxy associations. The catalog of associations (Bukhmastova 2001) compiled from the LEDA catalog of galaxies (Paturel 1997) and from…