Quasar lenses and pairs in the VST-ATLAS and Gaia
A. Agnello, P. L. Schechter, N. D. Morgan, T. Treu, C. Grillo, D., Malesani, T. Anguita, Y. Apostolovski, C. E. Rusu, V. Motta, K. Rojas, B., Chehade, T. Shanks

TL;DR
This paper reports the discovery of new quasar lenses and pairs using data mining and image modeling in the ATLAS and Gaia datasets, confirming one lens and identifying additional candidates for gravitational lensing.
Contribution
The study introduces a novel combination of data mining, image modeling, and Gaia spatial resolution to identify and confirm quasar lenses and pairs in large sky surveys.
Findings
Confirmed one new gravitational lens at z=0.277
Discovered 11 lens/NIQ systems in the ATLAS footprint
Demonstrated the effectiveness of Gaia data in lens selection
Abstract
We report on discovery results from a quasar lens search in the ATLAS public footprint, extending quasar lens searches to a regime without band or fiber-spectroscopic information, using a combination of data mining techniques on multi-band catalog magnitudes and image-cutout modelling. Spectroscopic follow-up campaigns, conducted at the 2.6m Nordic Optical Telescope (La Palma) and 3.6m New Technology Telescope (La Silla) in 2016, yielded seven pairs of quasars exhibiting the same lines at the same redshift and monotonic flux-ratios with wavelength (hereafter NIQs, Nearly Identical Quasar pairs). The quasar redshifts range between and contaminants are typically pairs of bright blue stars, quasar-star alignments along the line of sight, and narrow-line galaxies at Magellan data of A0140-1152 (014003.0-115219.0,…
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