Effects of Subhalos on Interpreting Highly Magnified Sources Near Lensing Caustics

TL;DR

This paper investigates how sub-galactic dark matter subhalos influence gravitational lensing caustics, affecting the interpretation of highly magnified distant sources like Earendel, and finds that accounting for subhalos relaxes previous size constraints and introduces minor astrometric perturbations.

Contribution

It demonstrates that subhalos significantly alter caustic properties and source size estimates, emphasizing the need to include subhalo effects in lensing analyses of high-redshift sources.

Findings

Source size constraints should be relaxed by a factor of a few to ten when subhalos are included.

Subhalos can cause astrometric perturbations up to 0.5 arcseconds.

Results are robust across different subhalo population models.

Abstract

Large magnification factors near gravitational lensing caustics of galaxy cluster lenses allow the study of individual stars or compact stellar associations at cosmological distances. We study how the presence of sub-galactic subhalos, an inevitable consequence of cold dark matter, can alter the property of caustics and hence change the interpretation of highly magnified sources that lie atop them. First, we consider a galaxy cluster halo populated with subhalos sampled from a realistic subhalo mass function calibrated to $N$-body simulations. Then, we compare a semi-analytical approximation and an adaptive ray-shooting method which we employ to quantify the property of the caustics. As a case study, we investigate Earendel, a $z = 6.2$ candidate of magnified single or multiple star system with a lone lensed image atop the critical curve in the Sunrise Arc. We find that the source size constraint ($\lesssim 0.3\, \mathrm{pc}$) previously derived from macro lens models should be relaxed by a factor of a few to ten when subhalos are accounted for, therefore allowing the possibility of a compact star cluster. The subhalos could introduce an astrometric perturbation that is $\lesssim 0.5''$, which does not contradict observation. These conclusions are largely robust to changes in the subhalo population. Subhalos therefore should be seriously accounted for when interpreting the astrophysical nature of similar highly magnified sources uncovered in recent high-$z$ observations.