First catalog of strong lens candidates in the COSMOS field
- Creators
- Faure, Cecile
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Kneib, Jean-Paul
- Covone, Giovanni
- Tasca, Lidia
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Leauthaud, Alexie
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Capak, Peter
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Jahnke, Knud
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Smolčić, Vernesa
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de la Torre, Sylvain
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Ellis, Richard
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Finoguenov, Alexis
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Koekemoer, Anton
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Le Fèvre, Oliver
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Massey, Richard
- Mellier, Yannick
- Refregier, Alexandre
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Rhodes, Jason
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Scoville, Nick
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Schinnerer, Eva
- Taylor, James
- Van Waerbeke, Ludovic
- Walcher, Jakob
Abstract
We present the first catalog of 67 strong galaxy-galaxy lens candidates discovered in the 1.64 deg^2 Hubble Space Telescope COSMOS survey. Twenty of these systems display multiple images or strongly curved large arcs. Our initial search is performed by visual inspection of the data and is restricted, for practical considerations, to massive early-type lens galaxies with arcs found at radii smaller than ~5". Simple mass models are constructed for the best lens candidates, and our results are compared to the strong lensing catalogs of the SLACS survey and the CASTLES database. These new strong galaxy-galaxy lensing systems constitute a valuable sample to study the mass distribution of early-type galaxies and their associated dark matter halos. We further expect this sample to play an important role in the testing of software algorithms designed to automatically search for strong gravitational lenses. From our analysis a robust lower limit is derived for the expected occurrence of strong galaxy-galaxy systems in current and future space-based wide-field imaging surveys. We expect that such surveys should uncover a large number of strong lensing systems (more than 10 systems per square degree), which will allow for a detailed statistical analysis of galaxy properties and will likely lead to constraints on models of gravitational structure formation and cosmology.
Additional Information
© 2008 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2007 March 5; accepted 2007 November 2. The HST COSMOS Treasury program was supported through NASA grant HST-GO-09822. We wish to thank Tony Roman, Denise Taylor, and David Soderblom for their assistance in the planning and scheduling of the extensive COSMOS observations. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the entire COSMOS collaboration consisting of more than 70 scientists. More information on the COSMOS survey is available at http://www.astro.caltech.edu/cosmos. Based on observations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) Inc., under NASA contract NAS 05-26555; also based on data collected at the Subaru Telescope, which is operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan; the European Southern Observatory under Large Program 175.A-0839, Chile; Kitt Peak National Observatory, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which are operated by AURA, Inc., under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. Based on observations obtained with MegaPrime/MegaCam, a joint project of CFHT and CEA/DAPNIA, at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope which is operated by the National Research Council of Canada, the Institute National des Sciences de l'Univers of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of France, and the University of Hawaii. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the excellent services provided by the NASA IPAC/IRSA staff (Anastasia Laity, Anastasia Alexov, Bruce Berriman, and John Good) in providing online archive and server capabilities for the COSMOS data sets. C. F. acknowledges support from the European Community's Sixth Framework Marie Curie Research Training Network Programme, contract MRTN-CT-2004-505183 "ANGLES." J. P. K. acknowledges support from CNRS and Caltech. G. C. is partially supported by the Cordis ERG proposal 029159.We thank the referee for useful remarks and J. Duke for correcting the draft. Facilities: HST (ACS), Subaru (Suprime). CFHT (Megacam).Attached Files
Published - FAUapjss08.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 14264
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20090519-093146142
- HST-GO-09822
- NASA
- NAS 05-26555
- NASA
- MRTN-CT-2004-505183 ''ANGLES''
- Marie Curie Fellowship
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
- Caltech
- Created
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2009-06-01Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- COSMOS, Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)