Finding Gravitational Lenses With X-rays

Abstract

There are $\sim 1$, 0.1 and 0.01 gravitationally lensed X-ray sources per square degree with soft X-ray fluxes exceeding $10^{-15},10^{-14}$ and $10^{-13}ergs/sc{m}^{-2}$ respectively. These sources will be detected serendipitously with the Chandra X-ray Observatory at a rate of 1--3 lenses per year of high resolution imaging. The low detection rate is due to the small area over which the HRC and ACIS cameras have the $<1\farcs5$ FWHM resolution necessary to find gravitational lenses produced by galaxies. Deep images of rich clusters at intermediate redshifts should yield one wide separation ($Δθ\gtorder 5\farcs0$) multiply-imaged background X-ray source for every $\sim 10$, 30 and 300 clusters imaged to the same flux limits.

13 pages, including 5 figures, submitted to ApJ Letters

References in corpus (3)

• A search for gravitational lensing in 38 X-ray selected clusters of galaxies
• The Core Structure of Galaxy Clusters from Gravitational Lensing
• Gravitational lensing statistics with extragalactic surveys. II. Analysis of the Jodrell Bank-VLA Astrometric Survey

Cited by in corpus (1)

• The Redshift Distribution of Flat-Spectrum Radio Sources