Enhanced lensing rate by clustering of massive galaxies: newly discovered systems in the SLACS fields

TL;DR

This study uses galaxy clustering to efficiently identify gravitational lenses in HST data, discovering four new systems and revealing a higher lensing rate in targeted fields compared to random surveys.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, multi-method approach for lens detection in HST images and reports the discovery of new lens systems, expanding understanding of lensing in different galaxy populations.

Findings

Higher lensing rate in targeted fields than random fields

Discovery of four new gravitational lens systems

Lenses are predominantly higher-redshift, lower-mass early-type galaxies

Abstract

[Abridged] We exploit the clustering of massive galaxies to perform a high efficiency imaging search for gravitational lenses. Our dataset comprises 44 fields imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), each of which is centered on a lens discovered by the Strong Lens ACS Survey (SLACS). We compare four different search methods: 1) automated detection with the HST Archive Galaxy-scale Gravitational Lens Survey (HAGGLeS) robot, 2) examining cutout images of bright galaxies (BGs) after subtraction of a smooth galaxy light distribution, 3) examining the unsubtracted BG cutouts, and 4) performing a full-frame visual inspection of the ACS images. We compute purity and completeness and consider investigator time for the four algorithms, using the main SLACS lenses as a testbed. The first and second algorithms perform the best. We present the four new lens systems discovered during this comprehensive search, as well as one other likely candidate. For each new lens we use the fundamental plane to estimate the lens velocity dispersion and predict, from the resulting lens geometry, the redshifts of the lensed sources. Two of these new systems are found in galaxy clusters, which include the SLACS lenses in the two respective fields. Overall we find that the enhanced lens abundance (30^{+24}_{-8} lenses/degree^2) is higher than expected for random fields (12^{+4}_{-2} lenses/degree^2 for the COSMOS survey). Additionally, we find that the gravitational lenses we detect are qualitatively different from those in the parent SLACS sample: this imaging survey is largely probing higher-redshift, and lower-mass, early-type galaxies.