The COSMOS-Web Lens Survey (COWLS) I: Discovery of >100 high redshift strong lenses in contiguous JWST imaging

Abstract

We present the COSMOS-Web Lens Survey (COWLS), a sample of over 100 strong lens candidates from the $0.54$\,deg${}^2$ COSMOS-Web survey, discovered using exquisite James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) imaging across four wavebands. Following two rounds of visual inspection, over 100 candidates were ranked as `high confidence' or `likely' by at least $50\%$ of inspectors. The COWLS sample has several notable properties: (i) magnified source galaxies spanning redshifts $z\sim 0.1$ to $z\sim 9$, which therefore extend into the epoch of reionisation; (ii) the highest-redshift lens galaxies known, pushing galaxy density profile evolution studies beyond $z\sim 2$; (iii) all lenses are distributed within a contiguous $0.54$\,deg${}^2$ region, allowing for joint strong and weak lensing analyses; and (iv) a subset exhibits lensed source emission ray-traced near the lens galaxy centers, enabling studies of supermassive black holes and dust absorption. A key innovation of our approach is the use of lens modelling to aid in identifying lenses that may otherwise be missed. This paper is accompanied by the first COWLS public release, providing JWST NIRCam imaging in four bands, lens models, pixelized source reconstructions and lens redshift estimates : https://github.com/Jammy2211/COWLS_COSMOS_Web_Lens_Survey

arXiv comment32 pages, 15 figures, published in MNRAS, Full data release: https://github.com/Jammy2211/COWLS_COSMOS_Web_Lens_Survey

References in corpus (94)

• SciPy 1.0--Fundamental Algorithms for Scientific Computing in Python
• Astropy: A Community Python Package for Astronomy
• The NumPy array: a structure for efficient numerical computation
• The Structure of Cold Dark Matter Halos
• The Astropy Project: Building an inclusive, open-science project and status of the v2.0 core package
• scikit-image: Image processing in Python
• dynesty: A Dynamic Nested Sampling Package for Estimating Bayesian Posteriors and Evidences
• CANDELS: The Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey - The Hubble Space Telescope Observations, Imaging Data Products and Mosaics
• Overview of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys
• Detailed Decomposition of Galaxy Images. II. Beyond Axisymmetric Models
• Accurate photometric redshifts for the CFHT Legacy Survey calibrated using the VIMOS VLT Deep Survey
• Measuring and Modelling the Redshift Evolution of Clustering: the Hubble Deep Field North
• The Sloan Lens ACS Survey. X. Stellar, Dynamical, and Total Mass Correlations of Massive Early-type Galaxies
• The Sloan Lens ACS Survey. I. A Large Spectroscopically Selected Sample of Massive Early-Type Lens Galaxies
• Efficient Multi-Gaussian Expansion of galaxies
• Wet Disc Contraction to Galactic Blue Nuggets and Quenching to Red Nuggets
• The Sloan Lens ACS Survey. IV: the mass density profile of early-type galaxies out to 100 effective radii
• The Sloan Lens ACS Survey. V. The Full ACS Strong-Lens Sample
• The Structure & Dynamics of Massive Early-type Galaxies: On Homology, Isothermality and Isotropy inside one Effective Radius
• TDCOSMO IV: Hierarchical time-delay cosmography -- joint inference of the Hubble constant and galaxy density profiles
• The population of galaxy-galaxy strong lenses in forthcoming optical imaging surveys
• Extragalactic millimeter-wave sources in South Pole Telescope survey data: source counts, catalog, and statistics for an 87 square-degree field
• COSMOS: 3D weak lensing and the growth of structure
• Semi-linear gravitational lens inversion
• Inference of the Cold Dark Matter substructure mass function at z=0.2 using strong gravitational lenses
• "Super-deblended" Dust Emission in Galaxies: II. Far-IR to (sub)millimeter photometry and high redshift galaxy candidates in the full COSMOS field
• A dynamically cold disk galaxy in the early Universe
• Simultaneous Multicolor Detection of Faint Galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field
• The CFHTLS-Strong Lensing Legacy Survey (SL2S): Investigating the group-scale lenses with the SARCS sample
• A precise extragalactic test of General Relativity
• AzTEC millimeter survey of the COSMOS field - III. Source catalog over 0.72 sq. deg. and plausible boosting by large-scale structure
• Dynamical properties of z $\sim 4.5$ dusty star-forming galaxies and their connection with local early type galaxies
• First catalog of strong lens candidates in the COSMOS field
• The BOSS Emission-Line Lens Survey. II. Investigating Mass-Density Profile Evolution in the SLACS+BELLS Strong Gravitational Lens Sample
• Cosmological Constraints from the double source plane lens SDSSJ0946+1006
• CEERS Key Paper V: A triality on the nature of HST-dark galaxies
• Mapping dust through emission and absorption in nearby galaxies
• The SL2S Galaxy-scale Lens Sample. III. Lens Models, Surface Photometry and Stellar Masses for the final sample
• Dark matter halos of massive elliptical galaxies at $z\sim 0.2$ are well described by the Navarro-Frenk-White profile
• AutoLens: Automated Modeling of a Strong Lens's Light, Mass and Source
• RingFinder: automated detection of galaxy-scale gravitational lenses in ground-based multi-filter imaging data
• Modelling the line-of-sight contribution in substructure lensing
• Low-mass halo perturbations in strong gravitational lenses at redshift z$\sim$0.5 are consistent with CDM
• The Sloan Lens ACS Survey. XIII. Discovery of 40 New Galaxy-Scale Strong Lenses
• Survey of Gravitationally-lensed Objects in HSC Imaging (SuGOHI). I. Automatic search for galaxy-scale strong lenses
• Unveiling the Nature of Infrared Bright, Optically Dark Galaxies with Early JWST Data
• Finding high-redshift strong lenses in DES using convolutional neural networks
• The Sloan Lens ACS Survey. XII. Extending Strong Lensing to Lower Masses
• Adaptive Semi-linear Inversion of Strong Gravitational Lens Imaging
• PyAutoLens: Open-Source Strong Gravitational Lensing
• ALMA maps the Star-Forming Regions in a Dense Gas Disk at z~3
• The SL2S Galaxy-scale Gravitational Lens Sample. I. The alignment of mass and light in massive early-type galaxies at z=0.2-0.9
• The elliptical power law profile lens
• Early Science with the Large Millimeter Telescope: Observations of Extremely Luminous High-z Sources Identified by Planck
• LensExtractor: A Convolutional Neural Network in Search of Strong Gravitational Lenses
• The BOSS Emission-Line Lens Survey. III. : Strong Lensing of Ly$\alpha$ Emitters by Individual Galaxies
• The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS): a large-scale structure at z=0.73 and the relation of galaxy morphologies to local environment
• Gravitational lenses and lens candidates identified from the COSMOS field
• Survey of Gravitationally-lensed Objects in HSC Imaging (SuGOHI). VI. Crowdsourced lens finding with Space Warps
• COSMOS-Web: stellar mass assembly in relation to dark matter halos across $0.2<z<12$ of cosmic history
• Strong lens systems search in the Dark Energy Survey using Convolutional Neural Networks
• The Sloan Lens ACS Survey. XI. Beyond Hubble resolution: size, luminosity and stellar mass of compact lensed galaxies at intermediate redshift
• Line-of-sight effects in strong lensing: Putting theory into practice
• Automated galaxy-galaxy strong lens modelling: no lens left behind
• Line-of-sight effects in strong gravitational lensing
• Red nuggets grow inside-out: evidence from gravitational lensing
• Project Dinos I: A joint lensing-dynamics constraint on the deviation from the power law in the mass profile of massive ellipticals
• PyAutoFit: A Classy Probabilistic Programming Language for Model Composition and Fitting
• Abell 1201: Detection of an Ultramassive Black Hole in a Strong Gravitational Lens
• Discovery of a Quadruple Lens in CANDELS with a Record Lens Redshift z=1.53
• Beyond the bulge-halo conspiracy? Density profiles of Early-type galaxies from extended-source strong lensing
• Testing strong lensing subhalo detection with a cosmological simulation
• Systematic errors induced by the elliptical power-law model in galaxy-galaxy strong lens modeling
• Hubble Asteroid Hunter: II. Identifying strong gravitational lenses in HST images with crowdsourcing
• Unified lensing and kinematic analysis for any elliptical mass profile
• Strong lensing selection effects
• A photo-z cautionary tale: Redshift confirmation of COSBO-7 at z=2.625
• Euclid: The Early Release Observations Lens Search Experiment
• Statistical strong lensing. III. Inferences with complete samples of lenses
• Auto-identification of unphysical source reconstructions in strong gravitational lens modelling
• Cosmic Shear with Einstein Rings
• The COSMOS-Web ring: in-depth characterization of an Einstein ring lensing system at z~2
• Measuring line-of-sight shear with Einstein rings: a proof of concept
• On the detectability of strong lensing in near-infrared surveys
• Euclid: A complete Einstein ring in NGC 6505
• A large population of strongly lensed faint submillimetre galaxies in future dark energy surveys inferred from JWST imaging
• A model for galaxy-galaxy strong lensing statistics in surveys
• The SLACS strong lens sample, debiased
• `Upper-Limit Lensing': Constraining galaxy stellar masses with singly-imaged background sources
• Constraints on dark energy from TDCOSMO & SLACS lenses
• The COSMOS-Web ring: Spectroscopic confirmation of the background source at z = 5.1
• Weak lensing of strong lensing: beyond the tidal regime
• Probing General Relativity in galactic scales at z $\sim 0.3$
• Investigating the Redshift Evolution of Lensing Galaxy Density Slopes via Model-Independent Distance Ratios

Cited by in corpus (7)

• COSMOS2025: The COSMOS-Web galaxy catalog of photometry, morphology, redshifts, and physical parameters from JWST, HST, and ground-based imaging
• An ultra-high-resolution map of (dark) matter
• The COSMOS-Web Lens Survey (COWLS) II: depth, resolution, and NIR coverage from JWST reveal 17 spectacular lenses
• The revolution in strong lensing discoveries from Euclid
• JWSTs PEARLS: NIRCam imaging and NIRISS spectroscopy of a $z=3.6$ star-forming galaxy lensed into a near-Einstein Ring by a $z=1.258$ massive elliptical galaxy
• Galaxy-scale lens search in the PEARLS NEP TDF and CEERS JWST fields
• Using Strong Lensing to Detect Subhalos with Steep Inner Density Profiles