The Longest Delay: a 14.5 Yr Campaign to Determine the Third Time Delay in the Lensing Cluster SDSS~J1004+4112

TL;DR

This study presents a 14.5-year observational campaign measuring the longest gravitational lensing time delay of 6.73 years in SDSS J1004+4112, providing valuable data for cosmology and lens modeling.

Contribution

It reports the first measurement of the third, longest time delay in a cluster lens system using Bayesian model averaging over light curve models.

Findings

Longest gravitational lens time delay measured to date (6.73 years).

Consistent delays with previous measurements for other image pairs.

Microlensing causes slow differential variability in quasar images.

Abstract

We present new light curves for the four bright images of the five image cluster-lensed quasar gravitational lens system SDSS~J1004+4112. The light curves span 14.5 yr and allow measurement of the time delay between the trailing bright quasar image D and the leading image C. When we fit all four light curves simultaneously and combine the models using the Bayes information criterion, we find a time delay of $\Delta t_{DC}= 2458.47 \pm 1.02$ days (6.73 yr), the longest ever measured for a gravitational lens. For the other two independent time delays we obtain $\Delta t_{BC}=782.20 \pm 0.43$ days (2.14 yr) and $\Delta t_{AC}= 825.23 \pm 0.46$ days (2.26 yr), in agreement with previous results. The information criterion is needed to weight the results for light curve models with different polynomial orders for the intrinsic variability and the effects of differential microlensing. The results using the Akaike information criterion are slightly different, but, in practice, the absolute delay errors are all dominated by the $\sim 4\%$ cosmic variance in the delays rather than the statistical or systematic measurement uncertainties. Despite the lens being a cluster, the quasar images show slow differential variability due to microlensing at the level of a few tenths of a magnitude.