Distortion of the luminosity function of high-redshift galaxies by gravitational lensing

TL;DR

This paper investigates how gravitational lensing by large-scale structures distorts the observed luminosity functions of high-redshift galaxies, emphasizing the importance of intermediate and small magnifications and the surface brightness profiles in observational biases.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of lensing effects on high-redshift galaxy luminosity functions, highlighting the significance of surface brightness profiles and selection criteria.

Findings

Lensing significantly alters the observed luminosity function even without strong lensing.

Intermediate and small magnifications (mu < 2) are most common and impactful.

Ignoring surface brightness profiles can overestimate bright galaxy counts by nearly two orders of magnitude.

Abstract

The observed properties of high redshift galaxies depend on the underlying foreground distribution of large scale structure, which distorts their intrinsic properties via gravitational lensing. We focus on the regime where the dominant contribution originates from a single lens and examine the statistics of gravitational lensing by a population of virialized and non-virialized structures using sub-mm galaxies at z ~ 2.6 and Lyman-break galaxies at redshifts z ~ 6 - 15 as the background sources. We quantify the effect of lensing on the luminosity function of the high redshift sources, focusing on the intermediate and small magnifications, mu < 2, which affect the majority of the background galaxies, and comparing to the case of strong lensing. We show that, depending on the intrinsic properties of the background galaxies, gravitational lensing can significantly affect the observed luminosity function even when no obvious strong lenses are present. Finally, we find that in the case of the Lyman-break galaxies it is important to account for the surface brightness profiles of both the foreground and the background galaxies when computing the lensing statistics, which introduces a selection criterion for the background galaxies that can actually be observed. Not taking this criterion into account leads to an overestimation of the number densities of very bright galaxies by nearly two orders of magnitude.