The Initial Mass Function of Lens Galaxies from Quasar Microlensing

Jiménez-Vicente, J.; Mediavilla, E.

doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ab46b8

Cited by 19 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…This result is in line with previous work (e.g. Wambsganss 1992;Lewis & Irwin 1995;Wyithe & Turner 2001;Vernardos & Fluke 2013;Mediavilla et al 2015;Jiménez-Vicente & Mediavilla 2019).…”

Section: Magnification Mapssupporting

confidence: 93%

Measuring accretion disk sizes of lensed quasars with microlensing time delay in multi-band light curves

Chan

Rojas

Millon

et al. 2021

A&A

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Time-delay cosmography in strongly lensed quasars offers an independent way of measuring the Hubble constant, H0. However, it has been proposed that the combination of microlensing and source-size effects, also known as microlensing time delay, can potentially increase the uncertainty in time-delay measurements as well as lead to a biased time delay. In this work, we first investigate how microlensing time delay changes with assumptions on the initial mass function (IMF) and find that the more massive microlenses produce the sharper distributions of microlensing time delays. We also find that the IMF has a modest effect on the magnification probability distributions. Second, we present a new method to measure the color-dependent source size in lensed quasars using the microlensing time delays inferred from multi-band light curves. In practice, the relevant observable is the differential microlensing time delays between different bands. We show from a simulation using the facility as Vera C. Rubin Observatory that if this differential time delay between bands can be measured with a precision of 0.1 days in any given lensed image, the disk size can be recovered to within a factor of 2. If four lensed images are used, our method is able to achieve an unbiased source measurement within an error on the order of 20%, which is comparable with other techniques.

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“…This result is in line with previous work (e.g. Wambsganss 1992;Lewis & Irwin 1995;Wyithe & Turner 2001;Vernardos & Fluke 2013;Mediavilla et al 2015;Jiménez-Vicente & Mediavilla 2019).…”

Section: Magnification Mapssupporting

confidence: 93%

Measuring accretion disk sizes of lensed quasars with microlensing time delay in multi-band light curves

Chan

Rojas

Millon

et al. 2021

A&A

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“…At the same time, the microlensing optical depth increases quickly towards galaxy centre. Thus more stringent constraints on the stellar IMF can be obtained from smaller-separations lenses using both strong lensing and microlensing effects (e.g., Treu et al 2010;Auger et al 2010a;Ferreras et al 2010;Brewer et al 2014;Spiniello et al 2015;Jiménez-Vicente & Mediavilla 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Strongly-lensed QSO systems have been shown to be a powerful tool for a broad range of important topics in astronomy and astrophysics. They can be used to measure the initial mass function (IMF) and dark-matter substructures in the lensing galaxies (e.g., Mao & Schneider 1998;Metcalf & Madau 2001;Dalal & Kochanek 2002;Pooley et al 2009;Nierenberg et al 2014;Oguri et al 2014;Schechter et al 2014;Jiménez-Vicente & Mediavilla 2019). They also serve as a unique probe of the size and temperature profile of black hole accretion discs and black hole/host galaxy scaling relations at cosmological distances (e.g., Peng et al 2006;Ding et al 2017;Bate et al 2018;Morgan et al 2018;Ding et al 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discovering Strongly-lensed QSOs From Unresolved Light Curves

Shu,

Belokurov,

Evans

2020

Preprint

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We present a new method of discovering galaxy-scale, strongly-lensed QSO systems from unresolved light curves using the autocorrelation function. The method is tested on five rungs of simulated light curves from the Time Delay Challenge 1 that were designed to match the light-curve qualities from existing, ongoing, and forthcoming time-domain surveys such as the Medium Deep Survey of the Panoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System 1, the Zwicky Transient Facility, and the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Among simulated lens systems for which time delays can be successfully measured by current best algorithms, our method achieves an overall true positive rate of 28-58% for doublyimaged QSOs (doubles) and 36-60% for quadruply-imaged QSOs (quads) while maintains 10% false positive rates. We also apply the method to observed light curves of 22 known strongly-lensed QSOs, and recover 20% of doubles and 25% of quads. The tests demonstrate the capability of our method for discovering strongly-lensed QSOs from major time domain surveys. The performance of our method can be further improved by analysing multi-filter light curves and supplementing with morphological, colour, and/or astrometric constraints. More importantly, our method is particularly useful for discovering small-separation strongly-lensed QSOs, complementary to traditional imaging-based methods.

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“…When a quasar is multiply imaged by an intervening galaxy (the lens), the granulation of the matter of the lens galaxy in compact objects (microlenses) can affect the gravitational potential inducing changes in the flux of the lensed quasar images with respect to the ones expected if the matter in the galaxy were smoothly distributed. This effect is sensitive to both, the mass and the abundance of any population of compact objects of the lens galaxy (see, e.g., Schechter & Wambsganss 2004, Mediavilla et al 2009Pooley et al 2012;Schechter et al 2014;Jiménez-Vicente et al 2015a, 2015b, Schechter 2018, Jiménez-Vicente & Mediavilla, 2019, Esteban-Gutiérrez et al 2020.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Abundance of LIGO/Virgo Black Holes from Microlensing Observations of Quasars with Reverberation Mapping Size Estimates

Esteban-Gutiérrez,

Mediavilla,

Jiménez-Vicente

et al. 2022

Preprint

Self Cite

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Assuming a population of Black Holes (BHs) with masses in the range inferred by LIGO/Virgo from BH mergers, we use quasar microlensing observations to estimate their abundances. We consider a mixed population of stars and BHs and the presence of a smooth dark matter component. We adopt reverberation mapping estimates of the quasar size. According to a Bayesian analysis of the measured microlensing magnifications, a population of BHs with masses ∼ 30M constitutes less than 0.4% of the total matter at 68% confidence level (less than 0.9% at 90% confidence). We have explored the whole mass range of LIGO/Virgo BHs finding that this upper limit ranges from 0.5% to 0.4% at 68% C.L. (from 1.1% to 0.9% at 90% C.L.) when the BHs mass change from 10 to 60M . We estimate a 16% contribution from the stars, in agreement with previous studies based on a single mass population that do not consider explicitly the presence of BHs. These results are consistent with the estimates of BH abundances from the statistics of LIGO/Virgo mergers and rule out that PBHs (or any type of compact objects), in this mass range constitute a significant fraction of the dark matter.

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The Initial Mass Function of Lens Galaxies from Quasar Microlensing

Cited by 19 publications

References 44 publications

Measuring accretion disk sizes of lensed quasars with microlensing time delay in multi-band light curves

Measuring accretion disk sizes of lensed quasars with microlensing time delay in multi-band light curves

Discovering Strongly-lensed QSOs From Unresolved Light Curves

Abundance of LIGO/Virgo Black Holes from Microlensing Observations of Quasars with Reverberation Mapping Size Estimates

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