A Study of Gravitational Lens Chromaticity Using Ground-based Narrowband Photometry

Mosquera, A. M.; Muñoz, J. A.; Mediavilla, E.; Kochanek, C. S.
Bibliographical reference

The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 728, Issue 2, article id. 145 (2011).

Advertised on:
2
2011
Number of authors
4
IAC number of authors
1
Citations
44
Refereed citations
43
Description
We present observations of wavelength-dependent flux ratios for four gravitational lens systems (SDSS J1650+4251, HE 0435-1223, FBQ 0951+2635, and Q 0142-100) obtained with the Nordic Optical Telescope. The use of narrowband photometry, as well as the excellent seeing conditions during the observations, allows us to study their chromatic behavior. For SDSS J1650+4251, we determine the extinction curve of the dust in the zL = 0.58 lens galaxy and find that the 2175 Å feature is absent. In the case of HE 0435-1223, we clearly detect chromatic microlensing. This allows us to estimate the wavelength-dependent size of the accretion disk. We find an R-band disk size of rR s = 13 ± 5 light days for a linear prior on rR s and rR s = 7 ± 6 light days for a logarithmic prior. For a power-law size-wavelength scaling of rs vprop λ p , we were able to constrain the value of the exponent to p = 1.3 ± 0.3 for both rR s priors, which is in agreement with the temperature profiles of simple thin disk models (p = 4/3).
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Relativistic and Theoretical Astrophysics
Introduction Gravitational lenses are a powerful tool for Astrophysics and Cosmology. The goals of this project are: i) to obtain a robust determination of the Hubble constant from the time delay measured between the images of a lensed quasar; ii) to study the individual and statistical properties of dark matter condensations in lens galaxies from
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