Strong lensing time delay: a new way of measuring cosmic shear

Abstract

The phenomenon of cosmic shear, or distortion of images of distant sources unaccompanied by magnification, is an effective way of probing the content and state of the foreground Universe, because light rays do not have to pass through mass structures in order to be sheared. It is shown that the delay in the arrival times between two simultaneously emitted photons that appear to be arriving from a pair of images of a strongly lensed cosmological source contains not only information about the Hubble constant, but also the long range gravitational effect of galactic scale mass clumps located away from the light paths in question. This is therefore also a method of detecting shear. Data on time delays among a sample of strongly lensed sources can provide crucial information about whether extra dynamics beyond gravity and dark energy are responsible for the global flatness of space. If the standard $\Lambda CDM$ model is correct, there should be a large dispersion in the value of $H_0$ as inferred from the delay data by (the usual procedure of) ignoring the effect of all other mass clumps except the strong lens itself. The fact that there has not been any report of a significant deviation from the $h=$ 0.7 mark during any of the $H_0$ determinations by this technique may already be pointing to the absence of the random effect discussed here.

arXiv commentApJ in press

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• A New Channel for Detecting Dark Matter Substructure in Galaxies: Gravitational Lens Time Delays
• Gravitational lenses as cosmic rulers: density of dark matter and dark energy from time delays and velocity dispersions
• Unveiling the population of dual- and lensed- AGNs at sub-arcsec separations
• New multiple AGN systems with sub-arcsec separation: confirmation of candidates selected via the novel GMP method
• The robustness of angular diameter distances to the lens in the B1608+656 and RXJ1131-1231 systems
• On the absence of shear from perfect Einstein rings and the stability of geometry