Search

The distribution of mass in galaxy-scale strong gravitational lenses is often modelled as an elliptical power-law plus 'external shear', which notionally accounts for neighbouring galaxies and cosmic shear along our line of sight. A small amount of external shear could come from these sources, but we show that the vast majority does not. Except in a handful of rare systems, the best-fitting values do not correlate with independent measurements of line-of-sight shear: from weak lensing in 45 Hubble Space Telescope images, or in 50 mock images of lenses with complex distributions of mass. Instead, the best-fit external shear is aligned with the major or minor axis of 88 per cent of lens galaxies; and the amplitude of the external shear increases if that galaxy is discy. We conclude that 'external shear' attached to a power-law model is not physically meaningful, but a fudge to compensate for lack of model complexity. Since it biases other model parameters that are interpreted as physically meaningful in several science analyses (e.g. measuring galaxy evolution, dark matter physics or cosmological parameters), we recommend that future studies of galaxy-scale strong lensing should employ more flexible mass models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cold dark matter (DM) model predicts that every galaxy contains thousands of DM subhaloes; almost all other DM models include a physical process that smooths away the subhaloes. The subhaloes are invisible, but could be detected via strong gravitational lensing, if they lie on the line of sight to a multiply imaged background source, and perturb its apparent shape. We present a predominantly automated strong lens analysis framework, and scan for DM subhaloes in Hubble Space Telescope imaging of 54 strong lenses. We identify five DM subhalo candidates, including two especially compelling candidates (one previously known in SLACS0946 + 1006) where a subhalo is favoured after all of our tests for systematics. We find that the detectability of subhaloes depends upon the assumed parametric form for the lens galaxy's mass distribution, especially its degree of azimuthal freedom. Using separate components for DM and stellar mass reveals two DM subhalo candidates and removes four false positives compared to the single power-law mass model that is common in the literature. We identify 45 lenses without substructures, the number of which is key to statistical tests able to rule out models of, for example, warm or self-interacting DM. Our full analysis results are available at https://github.com/Jammy2211/autolens_subhalo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observations suggest that the dark matter and stars in early-type galaxies 'conspire' to produce a surprisingly simple distribution of total mass, ρ(r) ∝ ρ−γ, with γ ≈ 2. We measure the distribution of mass in 48 early-type galaxies that gravitationally lens a resolved background source. By fitting the source light in every pixel of images from the Hubble Space Telescope , we find a mean |$\langle \gamma \rangle =2.075_{-0.024}^{+0.023}$| with an intrinsic scatter between galaxies of |$\sigma _\gamma =0.172^{+0.022}_{-0.032}$| for the overall sample. This is consistent with and has similar precision to traditional techniques that employ spectroscopic observations to supplement lensing with mass estimates from stellar dynamics. Comparing measurements of γ for individual lenses using both techniques, we find a statistically insignificant correlation of |$-0.150^{+0.223}_{-0.217}$| between the two, indicating a lack of statistical power or deviations from a power-law density in certain lenses. At fixed surface mass density, we measure a redshift dependence, |$\partial \langle \gamma \rangle /\partial z=0.345^{+0.322}_{-0.296}$|⁠ , that is consistent with traditional techniques for the same sample of Sloan Lens ACS and GALaxy-Lyα EmitteR sYstems (GALLERY) lenses. Interestingly, the consistency breaks down when we measure the dependence of γ on the surface mass density of a lens galaxy. We argue that this is tentative evidence for an inflection point in the total mass-density profile at a few times the galaxy effective radius – breaking the conspiracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strong gravitational lensing offers a compelling test of the cold dark matter paradigm, as it allows for subhaloes with masses of ∼109 M⊙ and below to be detected. We test commonly used techniques for detecting subhaloes superposed in images of strongly lensed galaxies. For the lens we take a simulated galaxy in a ∼1013 M⊙ halo grown in a high-resolution cosmological hydrodynamical simulation, which we view from two different directions. Though the resolution is high, we note the simulated galaxy still has an artificial core which adds additional complexity to the baryon dominated region. To remove particle noise, we represent the projected galaxy mass distribution by a series of Gaussian profiles which precisely capture the features of the projected galaxy. We first model the lens mass as a (broken) power-law density profile and then search for small haloes. Of the two projections, one has a regular elliptical shape, while the other has distinct deviations from an elliptical shape. For the former, the broken power-law model gives no false positives and correctly recovers the mass of the superposed small halo; however, for the latter we find false positives and the inferred halo mass is overestimated by ∼4–5 times. We then use a more complex model in which the lens mass is decomposed into stellar and dark matter components. In this case, we show that we can capture the simulated galaxy's complex projected structures and correctly infer the input small halo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distribution of mass in galaxy-scale strong gravitational lenses is often modelled as an elliptical power law plus 'external shear', which notionally accounts for line-of-sight galaxies and cosmic shear. We argue that it does not, using three lines of evidence from the analysis of 54 galaxy-scale strong lenses: (i) strong lensing external shears do not correlate with weak lensing; (ii) the measured shear magnitudes in strong lenses (which are field galaxies) are too large (exceeding 0.05) for their environment and; (iii) the external shear position angle preferentially aligns or anti-aligns with the mass model position angle, indicating an internal origin. We argue the measured strong lensing shears are therefore systematically accounting for missing complexity in the canonical elliptical power-law mass model. If we can introduce this complexity into our lens models, this will further lensing studies of galaxy formation, dark matter and Cosmology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate how strong gravitational lensing can test contemporary models of massive elliptical (ME) galaxy formation, by combining a traditional decomposition of their visible stellar distribution with a lensing analysis of their mass distribution. As a proof of concept, we study a sample of three ME lenses, observing that all are composed of two distinct baryonic structures, a 'red' central bulge surrounded by an extended envelope of stellar material. Whilst these two components look photometrically similar, their distinct lensing effects permit a clean decomposition of their mass structure. This allows us to infer two key pieces of information about each lens galaxy: (i) the stellar mass distribution (without invoking stellar populations models) and (ii) the inner dark matter halo mass. We argue that these two measurements are crucial to testing models of ME formation, as the stellar mass profile provides a diagnostic of baryonic accretion and feedback whilst the dark matter mass places each galaxy in the context of LCDM large-scale structure formation. We also detect large rotational offsets between the two stellar components and a lopsidedness in their outer mass distributions, which hold further information on the evolution of each ME. Finally, we discuss how this approach can be extended to galaxies of all Hubble types and what implication our results have for studies of strong gravitational lensing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]