X-ray Observations of Gravitationally Lensed Quasars; Evidence for a Hidden Quasar Population

Abstract

The large magnification factors of gravitationally lensed (GL) systems allow us to investigate the properties of quasars with X-ray luminosities that are substantially lower than those of unlensed ones and also provide an independent means of estimating the contribution of faint quasars to the hard X-ray component of the cosmic X-ray background. Our spectral analysis indicate a flattening of the spectral index in the hard band (4-20keV restframe) for 2 radio-loud quasars in the GL quasar sample for which the data have moderate signal-to-noise ratio. We have identified a large fraction of Broad Absorption Line (BAL) quasars amongst the GL quasar population. We find that approximately 35% of radio-quiet GL quasars contain BAL features which is significantly larger than the 10% fraction of BAL quasars presently found in optically selected flux limited quasar samples. We present a simple model that estimates the effects of attenuation and lens magnification on the luminosity function of quasars and that explains the observed fraction of GL BAL quasars. These observations suggest that a large fraction of BAL quasars are missed from flux limited optical surveys. Modeling of several X-ray observations of the GL BAL quasar PG1115+080 suggests that the observed large X-ray variability may be caused in part by a variable intrinsic absorber consistent with previously observed variability of the BAL troughs in the UV band. The observed large X-ray flux variations in PG1115+080 offer the prospect of considerably reducing errors in determining the time delay with future X-ray monitoring of this system and hence constraining the Hubble constant H${}_0$.

19 pages, 10 figures, 9 Tables, accepted for publication in ApJ

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