The BOSS Emission-Line Lens Survey (BELLS). I. A large spectroscopically selected sample of Lens Galaxies at redshift ~ 0.5

Understand

We present a catalog of 25 definite and 11 probable strong galaxy-galaxy gravitational lens systems with redshifts 0.4 \lesssim z \lesssim 0.7, discovered spectroscopically by the presence of higher redshift emission-lines within the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of luminous galaxies, and confirmed with high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images of 44 candidates.

• Our survey extends the methodology of the Sloan Lens ACS Survey (SLACS: Bolton et al.
• 2006; 2008) to higher redshift.
• We describe the details of the BOSS spectroscopic candidate detections, our HST Adanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) image processing and analysis methods, and our strong gravitational lens modeling procedure.