A Spectroscopic Survey of the Fields of 28 Strong Gravitational Lenses: The Redshift Catalog

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive spectroscopic redshift catalog from a wide-field survey of 28 strong gravitational lens fields, providing valuable data for studying lens environments and large-scale structures affecting lensing.

Contribution

The study offers a large, unbiased redshift catalog with 9,768 galaxy redshifts obtained from multiple instruments, enhancing understanding of lens environments.

Findings

Redshift catalog contains 9,768 unique galaxy redshifts.

Majority of redshifts (82.4%) are between 0.1 and 0.7.

Median redshift of the catalog is 0.36.

Abstract

We present the spectroscopic redshift catalog from a wide-field survey of the fields of 28 galaxy-mass strong gravitational lenses. We discuss the acquisition and reduction of the survey data, collected over 40 nights of 6.5m MMT and Magellan time, employing four different multi-object spectrographs. We determine that no biases are introduced by combining datasets obtained with different instrument/spectrograph combinations. Special care is taken to determine redshift uncertainties using repeat observations. The redshift catalog consists of 9768 new and unique galaxy redshifts. 82.4% of the catalog redshifts are between z=0.1 and z=0.7, and the catalog median redshift is z=0.36. The data from this survey will be used to study the lens environments and line-of-sight structures to gain a better understanding of the effects of large scale structure on lens statistics and lens-derived parameters.