The Sloan Bright Arcs Survey : Discovery of Seven New Strongly Lensed Galaxies from z=0.66-2.94

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of seven new bright gravitational lens systems with sources at redshifts from 0.66 to 2.94, expanding the catalog of known strong lenses and providing detailed spectra and lens properties.

Contribution

It presents seven newly discovered strong lens systems from the Sloan Bright Arcs Survey, including their spectra, redshifts, and lens characteristics, adding significantly to the known sample.

Findings

Seven new bright gravitational lens systems discovered.

Source galaxies have high surface brightness and known redshifts.

Most lenses are associated with galaxy groups or clusters.

Abstract

We report the discovery of seven new, very bright gravitational lens systems from our ongoing gravitational lens search, the Sloan Bright Arcs Survey (SBAS). Two of the systems are confirmed to have high source redshifts z=2.19 and z=2.94. Three other systems lie at intermediate redshift with z=1.33,1.82,1.93 and two systems are at low redshift z=0.66,0.86. The lensed source galaxies in all of these systems are bright, with i-band magnitudes ranging from 19.73-22.06. We present the spectrum of each of the source galaxies in these systems along with estimates of the Einstein radius for each system. The foreground lens in most systems is identified by a red sequence based cluster finder as a galaxy group; one system is identified as a moderately rich cluster. In total the SBAS has now discovered 19 strong lens systems in the SDSS imaging data, 8 of which are among the highest surface brightness z\simeq2-3 galaxies known.