lenscat: a Public and Community-Contributed Catalog of Known Strong Gravitational Lenses

TL;DR

Lenscat is a publicly accessible, community-updated catalog of known strong gravitational lenses, designed to facilitate lensing research and crossmatching with transient event localizations.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, easy-to-use catalog and Python tools for community contributions and efficient lensing studies.

Findings

Crossmatched GW event localizations with known lenses.

Demonstrated utility with gamma-ray burst examples.

Enabled community-driven updates to the lens catalog.

Abstract

We present lenscat, a public and community-contributed catalog of strong gravitational lenses found by electromagnetic surveys. The main objective of lenscat is to compile a simple, easy-to-access catalog that can be used in a variety of lensing studies, such as facilitating the search for the host galaxy of a candidate strongly lensed transient event. We also provide a python package to interact with tools commonly used by the community. This allows end users both with and without lensing expertise to obtain a list of known strong lenses within a given search area, and to also rank them by their respective searched probabilities. Here, we exemplify this by crossmatching the gravitational wave joint sky localization region of an interesting pair of events GW170104-GW170814. Other examples with short gamma-ray bursts are given. Thanks to the open and simple infrastructure of lenscat, members of the lensing community can directly add newly found lenses from their own studies to help create a long-lasting catalog that is as exhaustive and accessible as possible.