2010

Gravitationally lensed quasars and supernovae in future wide-field optical imaging surveys

Oguri, Masamune, Marshall, Philip J.

Understand

Cadenced optical imaging surveys in the next decade will be capable of detecting time-varying galaxy-scale strong gravitational lenses in large numbers, increasing the size of the statistically well-defined samples of multiply-imaged quasars by two orders of magnitude, and discovering the first strongly-lensed supernovae.

  • We carry out a detailed calculation of the likely yields of several planned surveys, using realistic distributions for the lens and source properties and taking magnification bias and image configuration detectability into account.
  • We find that upcoming wide-field synoptic surveys should detect several thousand lensed quasars.
  • In particular, the LSST should find 8000 lensed quasars, 3000 of which will have well-measured time delays, and also ~130 lensed supernovae, which is compared with ~15 lensed supernovae predicted to be found by the JDEM.

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