Strong Lensing considerations for the LSST observing strategy

Abstract

Strong gravitational lensing enables a wide range of science: probing cosmography; testing dark matter models; understanding galaxy evolution; and magnifying the faint, small and distant Universe. However to date exploiting strong lensing as a tool for these numerous cosmological and astrophysical applications has been severely hampered by limited sample sized. LSST will drive studies of strongly lensed galaxies, galaxy groups and galaxy clusters into the statistical age. Time variable lensing events, e.g. measuring cosmological time delays from strongly lensed supernovae and quasars, place the strongest constraints on LSST's observing strategy and have been considered in the DESC observing strategy white papers. Here we focus on aspects of `static' lens discovery that will be affected by the observing strategy. In summary, we advocate (1) ensuring comparable (sub-arcsecond) seeing in the g-band as in r and i to facilitate discovery of gravitational lenses, and (2) initially surveying the entire observable extragalactic sky as rapidly as possible to enable early science spanning a broad range of static and transient interests.

White paper submitted in response to the LSST Cadence Optimization & Survey Strategy Call (Nov 2018), comments welcome

References in corpus (1)

• Deep and rapid observations of strong-lensing galaxy clusters within the sky localisation of GW170814

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• Differentiable Strong Lensing: Uniting Gravity and Neural Nets through Differentiable Probabilistic Programming
• Detecting gravitational lenses using machine learning: exploring interpretability and sensitivity to rare lensing configurations
• Be It Unresolved: Measuring Time Delays from Lensed Supernovae
• Decoding Dark Matter Substructure without Supervision
• Transformers as Strong Lens Detectors- From Simulation to Surveys