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Published May 31, 2019 | Submitted
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Gravitational Lensing and the Extragalactic Distance Scale

Abstract

The potential of gravitational lenses for providing direct, physical measurements of the Hubble constant, free from systematic errors associated with the traditional distance ladder, has long been recognized. However, it is only recently that there has been a convincing measurement of a time delay sufficiently accurate to carry out this program. By itself, an accurate time delay measurement does not produce an equivalently definite Hubble constant and the errors associated with models of the primary lens, propagation through the potential fluctuations produced by the large-scale structure and the global geometry of the universe must also be taken into account. The prospects for measuring several more time delays and the feasibility of making the corresponding estimates of the Hubble constant with total error smaller than ten percent are critically assessed.

Additional Information

We acknowledge support under NSF grants AST 92-23370 and AST 95-29170. Support for this work was also provided by NASA through grant number AR-06337.15-94A from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. We thank Ed Turner, David Hogg and the whole CLASS collaboration, especially Ian Browne, Chris Fassnacht, Sunita Nair and Tony Readhead, for discussions.

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Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023