Gravitational lensing model degeneracies: Is steepness all-important?

Abstract

In gravitational lensing, steeper mass profiles generically produce longer time delays but smaller magnifications, without necessarily changing the image positions or magnification ratios between different images. This is well known. We find in this paper, however, that even if steepness is fixed, time delays can still have significant model dependence, which we attribute to shape modeling degeneracies. This conclusion follows from numerical experiments with models of 35 galaxy lenses. We suggest that varying and twisting ellipticities, features that are explored by pixelated lens models but not so far by parametric models, have an important effect on time delays.

To appear in ApJ

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