ASTROMETRY AND ASTROPHYSICS WITH THE SPACE TELESCOPE RADIOASTRON

2008 ◽  
Vol 17 (07) ◽  
pp. 1055-1070 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDER F. ZAKHAROV
Keyword(s):  
Dark Matter ◽  
Optical Depth ◽  
Time Scales ◽  
Gravitational Lensing ◽  
Mass Density ◽  
Gravitational Lens ◽  
Integration Time ◽  
Sensitivity Threshold ◽  
Typical Time ◽  
Radio Band

It is well-known that gravitational lensing is a powerful tool in the investigation of the distribution of matter, including that of dark matter (DM). Typical angular distances between images and typical time scales depend on the gravitational lens masses. For the case of microlensing, angular distances between images or typical astrometric shifts are about 10-5 - 10-6 arcsec. Such an angular resolution will be reached with the space–ground VLBI interferometer, Radioastron. The basic targets for microlensing searches should be bright point-like radio sources at cosmological distances. In this case, an analysis of their variability and a solid determination of microlensing could lead to an estimation of their cosmological mass density. Moreover, one could not exclude the possibility that non-baryonic dark matter could also form microlenses if the corresponding optical depth were high enough. It is known that in gravitationally lensed systems the probability (the optical depth) of observing microlensing is relatively high. Therefore, for example, gravitationally lensed objects, like the CLASS gravitational lens B1600+434, appear to be most suitable to detect astrometric microlensing, since features of photometric microlensing have been detected in these objects. However, to directly resolve these images and to directly detect the apparent motion of the knots, the Radioastron sensitivity would have to be improved, since the estimated flux density is below the sensitivity threshold. Alternatively, they may be observed by increasing an integration time, assuming that a radio source has a typical core–jet structure and microlensing phenomena are caused by the superluminal apparent motions of knots. In the case of a confirmation (or a negation) of claims about microlensing in gravitational lens systems, one can speculate about the microlens contribution to the gravitational lens mass. Astrometric microlensing due Galactic MACHOs is not very important because of low optical depths and long typical time scales. Therefore, the launch of the space interferometer Radioastron will enable the investigation of microlensing in the radio band, giving rise to the possibility of not only resolving microimages but also of observing astrometric microlensing.

scholarly journals Studies of relativistic effects with radioastron space mission

2007 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.F. Zakharov
Keyword(s):  
Dark Matter ◽  
Optical Depth ◽  
Time Scales ◽  
Space Mission ◽  
Gravitational Lens ◽  
Integration Time ◽  
Sensitivity Threshold ◽  
Reliable Determination ◽  
Space Interferometer ◽  
Typical Time

In the review we discuss possible studies of GR phenomena such as gravitational microlensing and shadow analysis with the forthcoming RadioAstron space mission. It is well-known that gravitational lensing is a powerful tool in the investigation of the distribution of matter, including that of dark matter (DM). Typical angular distances between images and typical time scales depend on the gravitational lens masses. For the microlensing, angular distances between images or typical astrometric shifts are about 10-5 ? 10-6 as1. Such an angular resolution will be reached with the space-ground VLBI interferometer, Radioastron. The basic targets for microlensing searches should be bright point-like radio sources at cosmological distances. In this case, an analysis of their variability and a reliable determination of microlensing could lead to an estimation of their cosmological mass density. Moreover, one could not exclude the possibility that non-baryonic dark matter could also form microlenses if the corresponding optical depth were high enough. It is known that in gravitationally lensed systems, the probability (the optical depth) to observe microlensing is relatively high; therefore, for example, such gravitationally lensed objects, like CLASS gravitational lens B1600+434, appear the most suitable to detect astrometric microlensing, since features of photometric microlensing have been detected in these objects. However, to directly resolve these images and to directly detect the apparent motion of the knots, the Radioastron sensitivity would have to be improved, since the estimated flux density is below the sensitivity threshold, alternatively, they may be observed by increasing the integration time, assuming that a radio source has a typical core - jet structure and microlensing phenomena are caused by the superluminal apparent motions of knots. In the case of a confirmation (or a disproval) of claims about microlensing in grav?itational lens systems, one can speculate about the microlens contribution to the gravitational lens mass. Astrometric microlensing due to Galactic Macho's action is not very important because of low optical depths and long typical time scales. Therefore, the launch of the space interferometer Radioastron will give excellent new facilities to investigate microlensing in the radio band, allowing the possibility not only to resolve microimages but also to observe astrometric microlensing. Shadows around supermassive black holes can be detected with the RadioAstron space interferometer. .

scholarly journals Results from the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE)

1996 ◽  
Vol 169 ◽  
pp. 93-102
Author(s):  
B. Paczyński ◽  
K. Z. Stanek ◽  
A. Udalski ◽  
M. Szymański ◽  
J. Kałużny ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Dark Matter ◽  
Optical Depth ◽  
Time Scales ◽  
Gravitational Lensing ◽  
Characteristic Time ◽  
Variable Stars ◽  
Low Density ◽  
Galactic Bulge ◽  
Complete Sample ◽  
Disk Region

The analysis of the first three years of the OGLE data revealed 12 microlensing events of the Galactic bulge stars, with the characteristic time scales in the range 8.6 < t0 < 80 days, where t0 = RE/V. A complete sample of nine events gave the optical depth to gravitational microlensing larger than (3.3 ± 1.2) × 10–6, in excess of current theoretical estimates, indicating a much higher efficiency for microlensing by either bulge or disk lenses. The lenses are likely to be ordinary stars in the Galactic bar, which has its long axis elongated towards us. At this time we have no evidence that the OGLE events are related to dark matter. The OGLE color magnitude diagrams reveal the presence of the Galactic bar and a low density inner disk region ∼ 4 kpc in radius. A catalogue of a few thousand variable stars is in preparation.

scholarly journals Quantifying the structure of strong gravitational lens potentials with uncertainty-aware deep neural networks

2020 ◽  
Vol 499 (4) ◽  
pp. 5641-5652
Author(s):  
Georgios Vernardos ◽  
Grigorios Tsagkatakis ◽  
Yannis Pantazis
Keyword(s):  
Confidence Intervals ◽  
Galaxy Evolution ◽  
Gravitational Lensing ◽  
Probability Distributions ◽  
Mass Density ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Gaussian Random Fields ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Gravitational Lens ◽  
Data Set

ABSTRACT 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.

scholarly journals Inner dark matter distribution of the Cosmic Horseshoe (J1148+1930) with gravitational lensing and dynamics

2019 ◽  
Vol 631 ◽  
pp. A40 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Schuldt ◽  
G. Chirivì ◽  
S. H. Suyu ◽  
A. Yıldırım ◽  
A. Sonnenfeld ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Dark Matter ◽  
Gravitational Lensing ◽  
Gravitational Lens ◽  
Wide Field ◽  
Lens System ◽  
Matter Distribution ◽  
Mass Model ◽  
Luminous Matter ◽  
Dark Matter Distribution ◽  
Light Components

We present a detailed analysis of the inner mass structure of the Cosmic Horseshoe (J1148+1930) strong gravitational lens system observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). In addition to the spectacular Einstein ring, this systems shows a radial arc. We obtained the redshift of the radial arc counterimage zs, r = 1.961 ± 0.001 from Gemini observations. To disentangle the dark and luminous matter, we considered three different profiles for the dark matter (DM) distribution: a power law profile, the Navarro, Frenk, and White (NFW) profile, and a generalized version of the NFW profile. For the luminous matter distribution, we based the model on the observed light distribution that is fitted with three components: a point mass for the central light component resembling an active galactic nucleus, and the remaining two extended light components scaled by a constant mass-to-light ratio (M/L). To constrain the model further, we included published velocity dispersion measurements of the lens galaxy and performed a self-consistent lensing and axisymmetric Jeans dynamical modeling. Our model fits well to the observations including the radial arc, independent of the DM profile. Depending on the DM profile, we get a DM fraction between 60% and 70%. With our composite mass model we find that the radial arc helps to constrain the inner DM distribution of the Cosmic Horseshoe independently of the DM profile.

scholarly journals Gravitational microlensing time delays at high optical depth: image parities and the temporal properties of fast radio bursts

2020 ◽  
Vol 497 (2) ◽  
pp. 1583-1589
Author(s):  
Geraint F Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Optical Depth ◽  
Gravitational Lensing ◽  
Time Delays ◽  
Saddle Points ◽  
Gravitational Lens ◽  
Depth Image ◽  
Short Time Scale ◽  
Solar Mass ◽  
Transient Sources ◽  
The Impact

ABSTRACT Due to differing gravitational potentials and path lengths, gravitational lensing induces time delays between multiple images of a source that, for solar mass objects, are of the order of ∼10−5 s. If an astrophysically compact source, such as a fast radio burst (FRB), is observed through a region with a high optical depth of such microlensing masses, this gravitational lensing time delay can be imprinted on short time-scale transient signals. In this paper, we consider the impact of the parity of the macroimage on the resultant microlensing time delays. It is found that this parity is directly imprinted on the microlensing signal, with macroimages formed at minima of the time arrival surface beginning with the most highly magnified microimages and then progressing to the fainter microimages. For macroimages at the maxima of the time arrival surface, this situation is reversed, with fainter images observed first and finishing with the brightest microimages. For macroimages at saddle points, the signal again begins with fainter images, followed by brighter images before again fading through the fainter microimages. The growing populations of cosmologically distant bursty transient sources will undoubtedly result in the discovery of strong lensed, multiply imaged FRBs, which will be susceptible to microlensing by compact masses. With the temporal resolution being offered by modern and future facilities, the detection of microlensing-induced time delays will reveal the parities of the gravitational lens macroimages, providing additional constraints on macrolensing mass models and improving the efficacy of these transient sources as cosmological probes.

scholarly journals Systematic errors in strong gravitational lensing reconstructions, a numerical simulation perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 496 (2) ◽  
pp. 1718-1729 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Enzi ◽  
Simona Vegetti ◽  
Giulia Despali ◽  
Jen-Wei Hsueh ◽  
R Benton Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
Gravitational Lensing ◽  
Time Delays ◽  
Surface Brightness ◽  
Mass Density ◽  
Control Sample ◽  
Brightness Distribution ◽  
Gravitational Lens ◽  
Galactic Potentials ◽  
Fractional Error ◽  
Approximate Bayesian

ABSTRACT We present the analysis of a sample of 24 SLACS-like galaxy–galaxy strong gravitational lens systems with a background source and deflectors from the Illustris-1 simulation. We study the degeneracy between the complex mass distribution of the lenses, substructures, the surface brightness distribution of the sources, and the time delays. Using a novel inference framework based on Approximate Bayesian Computation, we find that for all the considered lens systems, an elliptical and cored power-law mass density distribution provides a good fit to the data. However, the presence of cores in the simulated lenses affects most reconstructions in the form of a Source Position Transformation. The latter leads to a systematic underestimation of the source sizes by 50 per cent on average, and a fractional error in H0 of around $25_{-19}^{+37}$ per cent. The analysis of a control sample of 24 lens systems, for which we have perfect knowledge about the shape of the lensing potential, leads to a fractional error on H0 of $12_{-3}^{+6}$ per cent. We find no degeneracy between complexity in the lensing potential and the inferred amount of substructures. We recover an average total projected mass fraction in substructures of fsub &lt; 1.7–2.0 × 10−3 at the 68 per cent confidence level in agreement with zero and the fact that all substructures had been removed from the simulation. Our work highlights the need for higher resolution simulations to quantify the lensing effect of more realistic galactic potentials better, and that additional observational constraint may be required to break existing degeneracies.

scholarly journals Gravitational Lensing, Dark Matter and the Optical Gravitational Lens Experiment

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Surdej ◽  
J.-F. Claeskens ◽  
C. Delacroix ◽  
T. Sadibekova ◽  
P. Bartczak ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Dark Matter ◽  
Gravitational Lensing ◽  
Gravitational Lens

scholarly journals On the Possibilities of Detecting Dark Matter by the Gravitational Lens Effect

1988 ◽  
Vol 130 ◽  
pp. 601-601
Author(s):  
R. Kayser
Keyword(s):  
Dark Matter ◽  
Gravitational Lensing ◽  
Critical Density ◽  
Compact Objects ◽  
Gravitational Lens ◽  
Lens Effect ◽  
Multiple Imaging

A class of compact objects with cosmological density ƍ leads to a probability for multiple imaging by gravitational lensing of roughly P ≈ ƍ/ƍc, where ƍc is the critical density.

scholarly journals Self-gravitating dark matter gets in shape

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (14) ◽  
pp. 2043017
Author(s):  
Jenny Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Dark Matter ◽  
Gravitational Lensing ◽  
Spatial Configuration ◽  
Mass Density ◽  
Gravitational Interaction ◽  
Mathematical Approach ◽  
Density Profiles ◽  
Physical Methods ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Galaxy Rotation Curves

In our current best cosmological model, the vast majority of matter in the universe is dark, consisting of yet undetected, nonbaryonic particles that do not interact electro-magnetically. So far, the only significant evidence for dark matter has been found in its gravitational interaction, as observed in galaxy rotation curves or gravitational lensing effects. The inferred dark matter agglomerations follow almost universal mass density profiles that can be reproduced well in simulations, but have eluded an explanation from a theoretical viewpoint. Forgoing standard (astro-)physical methods, I show that it is possible to derive these profiles from an intriguingly simple mathematical approach that directly determines the most likely spatial configuration of a self-gravitating ensemble of collisionless dark matter particles.

scholarly journals A VLA Gravitational Lens Survey

1987 ◽  
Vol 124 ◽  
pp. 747-750
Author(s):  
J. N. Hewitt ◽  
E. L. Turner ◽  
B. F. Burke ◽  
C. R. Lawrence ◽  
C. L. Bennett ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Dark Matter ◽  
Gravitational Field ◽  
Gravitational Lensing ◽  
Critical Density ◽  
Selection Effect ◽  
Compact Objects ◽  
Gravitational Lens ◽  
Gravitational Lenses ◽  
Number Density ◽  
Luminous Objects

Gravitational lens surveys are of cosmological interest because they provide a way to measure the gravitational field of both luminous and dark matter. Many of the other methods used to detect the presence of dark matter, such as studies of galaxy rotation curves and cluster dynamics, require that there be luminous objects in the gravitational field that act as tracers of the mass. This may introduce a selection effect. In constrast, in studies of gravitational lenses, the beacon we observe can be far (at distances of order one thousand Mpc) from the gravitational field. In this paper we describe a VLA survey designed to detect gravitational lensing on sub-arc second and arc second scales. We also present a preliminary result of the radio data: we find that the density of matter in the form of a uniform, comoving number density of 1011 to 1012M⊙ compact objects, luminous or dark, must be substantially less than the critical density.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document