Bias and consistency in time delay estimation methods: case of the double quasar HE 1104-1805

Abstract

We present a short re-evaluation of a recently published time delay estimate for the gravitational lens system HE 1104-1805 with emphasis on important methodological aspects: bias of the statistics, inconsistency of the methods and use of the purposeful selection of data points(or so-called "cleaning") at the preprocessing stage. We show how the inadequate use of simple analysis methods can lead to too strong conclusions. Our analysis shows that there are indications for the time delay in HE 1104-1805 to be between -0.9 and -0.7 years, but still with a large uncertainty.

5 pages, 5 figures, accepted as a Letter to the Editor in A&A

References in corpus (1)

• The Double Quasar HE1104-1805: a case study for time delay determination with poorly sampled lightcurves

Cited by in corpus (6)

• A Determination of H_0 with the CLASS Gravitational Lens B1608+656: III. A Significant Improvement in the Precision of the Time Delay Measurements
• COSMOGRAIL: the COSmological MOnitoring of GRAvItational Lenses XI. Techniques for time delay measurement in presence of microlensing
• Time delay measurement of the lensed quasar HE1104-1805
• A search for clusters and groups of galaxies on the line of sight towards 8 lensed quasars
• How accurate are the time delay estimates in gravitational lensing?
• TDCOSMO. XXIII. Measurement of the Hubble constant from the doubly lensed quasar HE1104-1805