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The “External” Shears In Strong Lens Models
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 March 2024
Abstract
The distribution of mass in galaxy-scale strong gravitational lenses is often modelled as an elliptical power law plus ‘external shear’, which notionally accounts for line-of-sight galaxies and cosmic shear. We argue that it does not, using three lines of evidence from the analysis of 54 galaxy-scale strong lenses: (i) strong lensing external shears do not correlate with weak lensing; (ii) the measured shear magnitudes in strong lenses (which are field galaxies) are too large (exceeding 0.05) for their environment and; (iii) the external shear position angle preferentially aligns or anti-aligns with the mass model position angle, indicating an internal origin. We argue the measured strong lensing shears are therefore systematically accounting for missing complexity in the canonical elliptical power-law mass model. If we can introduce this complexity into our lens models, this will further lensing studies of galaxy formation, dark matter and Cosmology.
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- Contributed Paper
- Information
- Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 18 , Symposium S381: Strong Gravitational Lensing in the Era of Big Data , December 2022 , pp. 13 - 16
- Creative Commons
- This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Astronomical Union