B0850+054: a new gravitational lens system from CLASS

Creators: Biggs, A. D.; Rusin, D.; Browne, I. W. A.; de Bruyn, A. G.; Jackson, N. J.; Koopmans, L. V. E.; McKean, J. P.; Myers, S. T.; Blandford, R. D.; Chae, K.-H.; Fassnacht, C. D.; Norbury, M. A.; Pearson, T. J.; Phillips, P. M.; Readhead, A. C. S.; Wilkinson, P. N.

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Abstract

We report the discovery of a new gravitational lens system from the CLASS survey. Radio observations with the VLA, WSRT and MERLIN show that the radio source B0850+054 is composed of two compact components with identical spectra, a separation of 0.7 arcsec and a flux density ratio of 6 : 1. VLBA observations at 5 GHz reveal structures that are consistent with the gravitational lens hypothesis. The brighter of the two images is resolved into a linear string of at least six subcomponents, whilst the weaker image is radially stretched towards the lens galaxy. UKIRT K-band imaging detects an 18.7-mag extended object, but the resolution of the observations is not sufficient to resolve the lensed images and the lens galaxy. Mass modelling has not been possible with the present data and the acquisition of high-resolution optical data is a priority for this system.

Additional Information

© 2003 RAS. Accepted 2002 October 5. Received 2002 September 13; in original form 2002 August 1. JPM, MAN and PMP acknowledge the receipt of PPARC studentships. LVEK acknowledges grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA (AST 99-00866, STScI-GO 06543.03-95A and STScI-AR-09222). The VLA and the VLBA are operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. MERLIN is run by the University of Manchester as a National Facility on behalf of PPARC. The WSRT is operated by ASTRON (Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy) with support from the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO). UKIRT is operated by the Joint Astronomy Centre on behalf of PPARC. We would like to thank the support staff of UKIRT with their help with the observations and Dafydd Wyn Evans for his help with the UKIRT astrometry. The W. M. Keck Observatory is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA. This research was supported in part by the European Commission TMR Programme, Research Network Contract ERBFMRXCT96-0034 'CERES'. We appreciate the comments of the anonymous referee.

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