Gaia Focused Product Release: A catalogue of sources around quasars to search for strongly lensed quasars

Abstract

Context. Strongly lensed quasars are fundamental sources for cosmology. The Gaia space mission covers the entire sky with the unprecedented resolution of $0.18$" in the optical, making it an ideal instrument to search for gravitational lenses down to the limiting magnitude of 21. Nevertheless, the previous Gaia Data Releases are known to be incomplete for small angular separations such as those expected for most lenses. Aims. We present the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium GravLens pipeline, which was built to analyse all Gaia detections around quasars and to cluster them into sources, thus producing a catalogue of secondary sources around each quasar. We analysed the resulting catalogue to produce scores that indicate source configurations that are compatible with strongly lensed quasars. Methods. GravLens uses the DBSCAN unsupervised clustering algorithm to detect sources around quasars. The resulting catalogue of multiplets is then analysed with several methods to identify potential gravitational lenses. We developed and applied an outlier scoring method, a comparison between the average BP and RP spectra of the components, and we also used an extremely randomised tree algorithm. These methods produce scores to identify the most probable configurations and to establish a list of lens candidates. Results. We analysed the environment of 3 760 032 quasars. A total of 4 760 920 sources, including the quasars, were found within 6" of the quasar positions. This list is given in the Gaia archive. In 87\% of cases, the quasar remains a single source, and in 501 385 cases neighbouring sources were detected. We propose a list of 381 lensed candidates, of which we identified 49 as the most promising. Beyond these candidates, the associate tables in this Focused Product Release allow the entire community to explore the unique Gaia data for strong lensing studies further.

35 pages, 60 figures, accepted for publication by Astronomy and Astrophysics

References in corpus (32)

• The Gaia mission
• Gaia Data Release 3: Summary of the content and survey properties
• In the Realm of the Hubble tension $-$ a Review of Solutions
• The Second-Generation Guide Star Catalog: Description and Properties
• Gaia Early Data Release 3 -- Catalogue validation
• Gaia Data Release 1: Catalogue validation
• unWISE: unblurred coadds of the WISE imaging
• The CatWISE2020 Catalog
• SkyMapper Southern Survey: Second Data Release (DR2)
• The WISE AGN Catalog
• Gaia Data Release 3: Processing and validation of BP/RP low-resolution spectral data
• The Gaia-ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey: Implementation, data products, open cluster survey, science, and legacy
• Gaia Data Release 3: External calibration of BP/RP low-resolution spectroscopic data
• The Gaia-ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey: Motivation, implementation, GIRAFFE data processing, analysis, and final data products
• Gaia Data Release 1, Pre-processing and source list creation
• Gaia Data Release 3: The extragalactic content
• Strong lensing time-delay cosmography in the 2020s
• Strong lensing signatures of self-interacting dark matter in low-mass halos
• Gaia Early Data Release 3. Building the Gaia DR3 source list -- Cross-match of Gaia observations
• Gravitationally lensed quasars in Gaia -- IV. 150 new lenses, quasar pairs, and projected quasars
• Detecting stars, galaxies, and asteroids with Gaia
• Unveiling the population of dual- and lensed- AGNs at sub-arcsec separations
• Constraints on interacting dark energy models from time-delay cosmography with seven lensed quasars
• Revisiting Studies of the Statistical Property of a Strong Gravitational Lens System and Model-independent Constraint on the Curvature of the Universe
• On the Power Spectrum of Dark Matter Substructure in Strong Gravitational Lenses
• Gaia GraL: Gaia DR2 Gravitational Lens Systems. VI. Spectroscopic Confirmation and Modeling of Quadruply-Imaged Lensed Quasars
• Inferring the concentration of dark matter subhalos perturbing strongly lensed images
• Complementary constraints on dark energy equation of state from strongly lensed gravitational wave
• Proper motion survey and kinematic analysis of the Rho Ophiuchi embedded cluster
• Detection of Galaxies with Gaia
• Gaia Data Release 3: Surface brightness profiles of galaxies and host galaxies of quasars
• Optical reconstruction of dust in the region of SNR RX J1713.7-3946 from astrometric data

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Observing the Galactic Underworld: Predicting photometry and astrometry from compact remnant microlensing events
• AT 2021hdr: A candidate tidal disruption of a gas cloud by a binary super massive black hole system
• Gaia GraL: Gaia gravitational lens systems IX. Using XGBoost to explore the Gaia Focused Product Release GravLens catalogue