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Upcoming wide-field surveys will discover thousands of new strongly lensed quasars which will be monitored with unprecedented cadence by the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Many of these quasars will undergo caustic-crossing events over the 10-yr LSST survey, during which the quasar's inner accretion disc crosses a caustic feature produced by an ensemble of microlenses. Such caustic-crossing events offer the unique opportunity to probe the vicinity of the central supermassive black hole, especially when combined with high cadence, multi-instrument follow-up triggered by LSST monitoring. To simulate the high-cadence optical monitoring of caustic-crossing events, we use relativistic accretion disc models which leads to strong asymmetric features. We develop analysis methods to measure the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) crossing time of isolated caustic-crossing events and benchmark their performance on our simulations. We also use our simulations to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) to infer the black hole mass, inclination angle, and impact angle directly from these light curves. As a pilot application of our methods, we used archival caustic-crossings of QSO 2237+0305 to estimate the black hole mass and inclination angle. From these data, two of these methods called the second derivative and wavelet methods measure an ISCO crossing time of 48.5 and 49.5 d, corresponding to a Kerr black hole mass of M BH = (1.5 ± 1.2) × 109 and (1.5 ± 1.3) × 109  M⊙, respectively. The CNN inferred log10(M BH/M⊙) = 8.35 ± 0.30 when trained on Schwarzschild black hole simulations, and a moderate inclination of i  = 45 ± 23°. These measurements are found to be consistent with previous estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gravitational lensing is a powerful tool for constraining substructure in the mass distribution of galaxies, be it from the presence of dark matter sub-haloes or due to physical mechanisms affecting the baryons throughout galaxy evolution. Such substructure is hard to model and is either ignored by traditional, smooth modelling, approaches, or treated as well-localized massive perturbers. In this work, we propose a deep learning approach to quantify the statistical properties of such perturbations directly from images, where only the extended lensed source features within a mask are considered, without the need of any lens modelling. Our training data consist of mock lensed images assuming perturbing Gaussian Random Fields permeating the smooth overall lens potential, and, for the first time, using images of real galaxies as the lensed source. We employ a novel deep neural network that can handle arbitrary uncertainty intervals associated with the training data set labels as input, provides probability distributions as output, and adopts a composite loss function. The method succeeds not only in accurately estimating the actual parameter values, but also reduces the predicted confidence intervals by 10 per cent in an unsupervised manner, i.e. without having access to the actual ground truth values. Our results are invariant to the inherent degeneracy between mass perturbations in the lens and complex brightness profiles for the source. Hence, we can quantitatively and robustly quantify the smoothness of the mass density of thousands of lenses, including confidence intervals, and provide a consistent ranking for follow-up science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a deep machine learning approach to studying quasar microlensing light curves for the first time by analysing hundreds of thousands of simulated light curves with respect to the accretion disc size and temperature profile. Our results indicate that it is possible to successfully classify very large numbers of diverse light-curve data and measure the accretion disc structure. The detailed shape of the accretion disc brightness profile is found to play a negligible role. The speed and efficiency of our deep machine learning approach is ideal for quantifying physical properties in a 'big-data' problem set-up. This proposed approach looks promising for analysing decade-long light curves for thousands of microlensed quasars, expected to be provided by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a tool to generate mock quasar microlensing light curves and sample them according to any observing strategy. An updated treatment of the fixed and random velocity components of observer, lens, and source is used, together with a proper alignment with the external shear defining the magnification map caustic orientation. Our tool produces quantitative results on high magnification events and caustic crossings, which we use to study three lensed quasars known to display microlensing, viz. RX J1131–1231, HE 0230–2130, and Q 2237+0305, as they would be monitored by The Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). We conclude that depending on the location on the sky, the lens and source redshift, and the caustic network density, the microlensing variability may deviate significantly than the expected ∼20-yr average time-scale (Mosquera & Kochanek 2011). We estimate that ∼300 high magnification events with Δmag>1 mag could potentially be observed by LSST each year. The duration of the majority of high magnification events is between 10 and 100 d, requiring a very high cadence to capture and resolve them. Uniform LSST observing strategies perform the best in recovering microlensing high magnification events. Our web tool can be extended to any instrument and observing strategy, and is freely available as a service at http://gerlumph.swin.edu.au/tools/lsst%5fgenerator/ , along with all the related code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central dark-matter fraction of galaxies is sensitive to feedback processes during galaxy formation. Strong gravitational lensing has been effective in the precise measurement of the dark-matter fraction inside massive early-type galaxies. Here, we compare the projected dark-matter fraction of early-type galaxies inferred from the SLACS (Sloan Lens ACS Survey) strong-lens survey with those obtained from the Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environment (EAGLE), Illustris, and IllustrisTNG hydrodynamical simulations. Previous comparisons with some simulations revealed a large discrepancy, with considerably higher inferred dark-matter fractions – by factors of ≈2–3 – inside half of the effective radius in observed strong-lens galaxies as compared to simulated galaxies. Here, we report good agreement between EAGLE and SLACS for the dark-matter fractions inside both half of the effective radius and the effective radius as a function of the galaxy's stellar mass, effective radius, and total mass-density slope. However, for IllustrisTNG and Illustris, the dark-matter fractions are lower than observed. This work consistently assumes a Chabrier initial mass function (IMF), which suggests that a different IMF (although not excluded) is not necessary to resolve this mismatch. The differences in the stellar feedback model between EAGLE and Illustris and IllustrisTNG are likely the dominant cause of the difference in their dark-matter fraction and density slope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use nine different galaxy formation scenarios in ten cosmological simulation boxes from the EAGLE (Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments) suite of Lambda cold dark matter hydrodynamical simulations to assess the impact of feedback mechanisms in galaxy formation and compare these to observed strong gravitational lenses. To compare observations with simulations, we create strong lenses with M * > 1011 M⊙ with the appropriate resolution and noise level, and model them with an elliptical power-law mass model to constrain their total mass density slope. We also obtain the mass–size relation of the simulated lens-galaxy sample. We find significant variation in the total mass density slope at the Einstein radius and in the projected stellar mass–size relation, mainly due to different implementations of stellar and active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback. We find that for lens-selected galaxies, models with either too weak or too strong stellar and/or AGN feedback fail to explain the distribution of observed mass density slopes, with the counter-intuitive trend that increasing the feedback steepens the mass density slope around the Einstein radius (≈3–10 kpc). Models in which stellar feedback becomes inefficient at high gas densities, or weaker AGN feedback with a higher duty cycle, produce strong lenses with total mass density slopes close to isothermal [i.e. −dlog (ρ)/dlog (r) ≈ 2.0] and slope distributions statistically agreeing with observed strong-lens galaxies in Sloan Lens ACS Survey and BOSS (Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) Emission-Line Lens Survey. Agreement is only slightly worse with the more heterogeneous Strong Lensing Legacy Survey lens-galaxy sample. Observations of strong-lens-selected galaxies thus appear to favour models with relatively weak feedback in massive galaxies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce the SEAGLE (i.e. Simulating EAGLE LEnses) programme, which approaches the study of galaxy formation through strong gravitational lensing, using a suite of high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations, Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments (EAGLE) project. We introduce the simulation and analysis pipeline and present the first set of results from our analysis of early-type galaxies. We identify and extract an ensemble of simulated lens galaxies and use the glamer ray-tracing lensing code to create mock lenses similar to those observed in the Sloan Lens ACS Survey (SLACS) and SL2S surveys, using a range of source parameters and galaxy orientations, including observational effects such as the point spread function, pixelization, and noise levels, representative of single-orbit observations with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) using the ACS- F 814 W filter. We subsequently model these mock lenses using the code lensed, treating them in the same way as observed lenses. We also estimate the mass model parameters directly from the projected surface mass density of the simulated galaxy, using an identical mass model family. We perform a three-way comparison of all the measured quantities with real lenses. We find the average total density slope of EAGLE lenses, $$t=2.26\,\, (0.25\,\, {\rm rms})$$ to be higher than SL2S, t  = 2.16 or SLACS, t  = 2.08. We find a very strong correlation between the external shear (γ) and the complex ellipticity (ε), with γ ∼ ε/4. This correlation indicates a degeneracy in the lens mass modelling. We also see a dispersion between lens modelling and direct fitting results, indicating systematical biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]