Related papers: Lensing galaxies: light or dark?
This paper argues that there is a large population of dark galaxies which reveals its presence by the gravitational lensing of quasars, and outnumbers normal galaxies by around 3:1. There are 8 double quasars with a separation greater than…
It is generally thought that galaxies are embedded in dark matter halos extending well beyond their luminous matter. The existence of these galactic halos is mainly derived from the larger than expected velocities of stars and gas in the…
We combine photometry and lens modeling to study the properties of 17 gravitational lens galaxies between z=0.1 and 1. Most of the lens galaxies are passively evolving early-type galaxies, with a few spirals. The colors, scale lengths, and…
Strong gravitational lensing can be used to directly measure the mass function of their satellites, thus testing one of the fundamental predictions of cold dark matter cosmological models. Given the importance of this test it is essential…
We discuss strong gravitational lensing by multiple objects along any line of sight. The probability for strong gravitational lensing by more than one lens is small, but a number of strong lens systems in which more than one separate lens…
Strong lensing has developed into an important astrophysical tool for probing both cosmology and galaxies (their structure, formation, and evolution). Using the gravitational lensing theory and cluster mass distribution model, we try to…
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…
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.…
Foreground galaxies that amplify the light from background quasars may also dim that light if the galaxies contain enough dust. Extinction by dust in lenses could hide the large number of lensed systems predicted for a flat universe with a…
This paper reviews statistical methods recently developed to reconstruct and analyze dark matter mass maps from weak lensing observations. The field of weak lensing is motivated by the observations made in the last decades showing that the…
Gravitational lensing has now become a popular tool to measure the mass distribution of structures in the Universe on various scales. Here we focus on the study of galaxy's scale dark matter halos with galaxy-galaxy lensing techniques:…
By directly probing mass distributions, gravitational lensing offers several new tests of the CDM paradigm. Lens statistics place upper limits on the dark matter content of elliptical galaxies. Galaxies built from CDM mass distributions are…
Clusters of galaxies have a huge mass which can act as gravitational lenses. Galaxies behind clusters can be distorted to form arcs in images by the lenses. Herein a search was done for giant lensed arcs by galaxy clusters using the SDSS…
Most gravitational lens galaxies are early-type galaxies in relatively low density environments. We show that they lie on the same fundamental plane as early-type galaxies in both local and distant rich clusters. Their surface brightness…
We give a non-exhaustive review of the use of strong gravitational lensing in placing constraints on the quantity of dark and visible mass in galaxies. We discuss development of the methodology and summarise some recent results.
[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…
We present the first automated spectroscopic search for disk-galaxy lenses, using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey database. We follow up eight gravitational lens candidates, selected among a sample of ~40000 candidate massive disk galaxies,…
We investigate the statistics of gravitational lenses in flat, low-density cosmological models with different cosmic equations of state w. We compute the lensing probabilities as a function of image separation \theta using a lens population…
Large scale imaging surveys will increase the number of galaxy-scale strong lensing candidates by maybe three orders of magnitudes beyond the number known today. Finding these rare objects will require picking them out of at least tens of…
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…