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Double dark matter vision: Twice the number of compact-source lenses with narrow-line lensing and the WFC3 grism

  • A. M. Nierenberg
  • , D. Gilman
  • , T. Treu
  • , G. Brammer
  • , S. Birrer
  • , L. Moustakas
  • , A. Agnello
  • , T. Anguita
  • , C. D. Fassnacht
  • , V. Motta
  • , A. H.G. Peter
  • , D. Sluse
  • Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
  • University of California at Los Angeles
  • University of Copenhagen
  • Universidad Andrés Bello
  • Millennium Institute of Astrophysics
  • University of California at Davis
  • Universidad de Valparaíso
  • Ohio State University
  • STAR Institute

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

46 Scopus citations

Abstract

The magnifications of compact-source lenses are extremely sensitive to the presence of lowmass darkmatter haloes along the entire sightline from the source to the observer. Traditionally, the study of darkmatter structure in compact-source strong gravitational lenses has been limited to radio-loud systems, as the radio emission is extended and thus unaffected by microlensing which can mimic the signal of dark matter structure. An alternate approach is to measure quasar nuclear-narrow-line emission, which is free from microlensing and present in virtually all quasar lenses. In this paper, we double the number of systems which can be used for gravitational lensing analyses by presenting measurements of narrow-line emission from a sample of eight quadruply imaged quasar lens systems, WGD J0405-3308, HS 0810+2554, RX J0911+0551, SDSS J1330+1810, PS J1606-2333, WFI 2026-4536, WFI 2033-4723, and WGD J2038-4008. We describe our updated grism spectral modelling pipeline, which we use to measure narrow-line fluxes with uncertainties of 2-10 per cent, presented here. We fit the lensed image positions with smooth mass models and demonstrate that these models fail to produce the observed distribution of image fluxes over the entire sample of lenses. Furthermore, typical deviations are larger than those expected from macromodel uncertainties. This discrepancy indicates the presence of perturbations caused by small-scale dark matter structure. The interpretation of this result in terms of dark matter models is presented in a companion paper.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)5314-5335
Number of pages22
JournalMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Volume492
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 2020

Keywords

  • Dark matter
  • Galaxies: Dwarf
  • Galaxies: Haloes
  • Gravitational lensing: Strong

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