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The “External” Shears In Strong Lens Models

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2024

James W. Nightingale Open the ORCID record for James W. Nightingale [Opens in a new window] ,
Amy Etherington  and
Richard Massey
James W. Nightingale*
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Durham University, South Rd, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK.
Amy Etherington
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Durham University, South Rd, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK.
Richard Massey
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Durham University, South Rd, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK.
*
email: james.w.nightingale@durham.ac.uk
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Abstract

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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.

Keywords

Strong lensinggalaxies
Type
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
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Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
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

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