Up to 100,000 reliable strong gravitational lenses in future dark energy experiments

Serjeant, S. (2014). Up to 100,000 reliable strong gravitational lenses in future dark energy experiments. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 793(1), article no. L10.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/2041-8205/793/1/L10

Abstract

The Euclid space telescope will observe ~105 strong galaxy-galaxy gravitational lens events in its wide field imaging survey over around half the sky, but identifying the gravitational lenses from their observed morphologies requires solving the difficult problem of reliably separating the lensed sources from contaminant populations, such as tidal tails, as well as presenting challenges for spectroscopic follow-up redshift campaigns. Here I present alternative selection techniques for strong gravitational lenses in both Euclid and the Square Kilometre Array, exploiting the strong magnification bias present in the steep end of the Hα luminosity function and the H I mass function. Around 103 strong lensing events are detectable with this method in the Euclid wide survey. While only ~1% of the total haul of Euclid lenses, this sample has ~100% reliability, known source redshifts, high signal-to-noise, and a magnification-based selection independent of assumptions of lens morphology. With the proposed Square Kilometre Array dark energy survey, the numbers of reliable strong gravitational lenses with source redshifts can reach 105.

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