Most Strong Lensing Deflectors in the AGEL Survey Are in Group and Cluster Environments

TL;DR

This study analyzes the environments of strong lensing deflectors in the AGEL survey, revealing many are in dense group and cluster environments, which impacts lens modeling and cosmological tests.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive measurement of deflector environments and Einstein masses for a large sample of strong lenses, highlighting environmental effects on lens properties.

Findings

47.2% of deflectors are in cluster environments

Weak correlation (r=0.38) between Einstein mass and galaxy surface density

AGEL deflectors are in denser environments than control fields

Abstract

The environments of deflectors in strong lensing systems affect our ability to test cosmological models and constrain evolutionary properties of galaxies. Here we measure the deflector scale (Einstein mass) and deflector environment (halo mass) of 89 spectroscopically confirmed strong lenses in the ASTRO3D Galaxy Evolution With Lenses (AGEL) survey. We classify deflector scale by measuring $\theta_{\rm{E}}$ to determine the mass enclosed by the Einstein radius, $M(<\theta_{\rm{E}})$. We quantify deflector environment by using photometric redshifts to determine the galaxy surface density to the fifth-nearest neighbor $\Sigma_5(z)$. We find that 47.2% of our deflectors are embedded in cluster environments, whereas only 9.0% have cluster-scale Einstein radii (masses). We measure a weak correlation ($r = 0.38$) between Einstein mass and $\Sigma_5(z)$, suggesting that the assumption of single galaxy-scale deflectors in lens modeling is overly-simplified. We hypothesize that the weak correlation results from galaxy-scale bias in the original AGEL selection and the observational challenge of detecting faint arcs with large Einstein radii. Comparing number densities, $N_{\rm{gal}}$, between AGEL and control fields, we find that AGEL deflectors are in systematically denser environments. Our study provides a method to identify strong lenses as a function of deflector environment and approximate the impact of large-scale environment in lens modeling. We provide the measured lensing parameters for our 89 AGEL systems as well as $z_{\rm{phot}}$ and $r$-mag (AB) maps of the line-of-sight.