TDCOSMO II: 6 new time delays in lensed quasars from high-cadence monitoring at the MPIA 2.2m telescope

TL;DR

This paper reports six new time-delay measurements in lensed quasars using high-cadence monitoring at the MPIA 2.2m telescope, demonstrating that precise delays can be obtained in just one or two seasons with high-quality data.

Contribution

It introduces a method for measuring accurate time delays in lensed quasars with minimal observing seasons using high-cadence, high signal-to-noise ratio data.

Findings

Six new time delays measured in lensed quasars.

Achieved high precision in delay measurements, some below 3.8% uncertainty.

Demonstrated feasibility of rapid delay measurement with high-cadence data.

Abstract

We present six new time-delay measurements obtained from $R_c$-band monitoring data acquired at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPIA) 2.2 m telescope at La Silla observatory between October 2016 and February 2020. The lensed quasars HE 0047-1756, WG 0214-2105, DES 0407-5006, 2M 1134-2103, PSJ 1606-2333 and DES 2325-5229 were observed almost daily at high signal-to-noise ratio to obtain high-quality light curves where we can record fast and small-amplitude variations of the quasars. We measured time delays between all pairs of multiple images with only one or two seasons of monitoring with the exception of the time delays relative to image D of PSJ 1606-2333. The most precise estimate was obtained for the delay between image A and image B of DES 0407-5006, where $\tau_{AB} = -128.4^{+3.5}_{-3.8}$ d (2.8% precision) including systematics due to extrinsic variability in the light curves. For HE 0047-1756, we combined our high-cadence data with measurements from decade-long light curves from previous COSMOGRAIL campaigns, and reach a precision of 0.9 d on the final measurement. The present work demonstrates the feasibility of measuring time delays in lensed quasars in only one or two seasons, provided high signal-to-noise ratio data are obtained at a cadence close to daily.