4:00–4:30 pm ERC 401
Harnessing Strong Gravitational Lensing to Constrain Mass and Light in Galaxy Clusters
Advisor: Mike Gladders
We present a comprehensive analysis of the mass and light distributions in cluster-scale strong gravitational lens systems. Strong gravitational lensing is a rare phenomenon in the universe in which massive foreground galaxies magnify and multiply-image background source galaxies into magnificent arcs. The COOL-LAMPS collaboration (Chicago Optically-Selected Lenses Located at the Margins of Public Surveys) has discovered and confirmed hundreds of lensing systems via color-magnitude selection and visual inspection with lens redshifts ranging from ~ 0.2 to ~ 1.2 in DECaLS (Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey) Data Release 8 images, of which 179 are analyzed here. In this work, we compute parametric estimates of the Einstein-radius-enclosed mass and luminosity for each system using only two measured parameters: the Einstein radius and the photometric galaxy-cluster redshift. We find that the mass-to-light ratio has little correlation with the redshift of the cluster, and we also parameterize the stellar-to-total mass ratio as a function of physical distance in kiloparsecs from the center of the BCG. This work will lay out a blueprint for studying larger samples of cluster-scale strong gravitational lens candidates in upcoming imaging surveys such as Rubin/LSST (Legacy Survey of Space and Time), in which an algorithmic treatment of lensing systems will be needed due to the sheer volume of data these surveys will produce.