H0LiCOW – I. H0 Lenses in COSMOGRAIL's wellspring: program overview

By Sherry H. Suyu, Vivien Bonvin, F. Courbin, C. Fassnacht, C. Rusu, Dominique Sluse, T. Treu, Kenneth C. Wong, M. Auger, Xuheng Ding and 14 more. 2016

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Strong gravitational lens systems with time delays between the multiple images allow measurements of time-delay distances, which are primarily sensitive to the Hubble constant that is key to probing dark energy, neutrino physics and the spatial curvature of the Universe, as well as discovering new physics. We present H0LiCOW (H-0 Lenses in COSMOGRAIL's Wellspring), a program that aims to measure H-0 with <3.5 per cent uncertainty from five lens systems (B1608+ 656, RXJ1131-1231, HE 0435-1223, WFI2033-4723 and HE 1104-1805). We have been acquiring (1) time delays through COSMOGRAIL and Very Large Array monitoring, (2) high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope imaging for the lens mass modelling, (3) wide-field imaging and spectroscopy to characterize the lens environment and (4) moderate-resolution spectroscopy to obtain the stellar velocity dispersion of the lenses for mass modelling. In cosmological models with one-parameter extension to flat Lambda cold dark matter, we expect to measure H-0 to <3.5 per cent in most models, spatial curvature Omega(k) to 0.004, w to 0.14 and the effective number of neutrino species to 0.2 (1s uncertainties) when combined with current cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. These are, respectively, a factor of similar to 15, similar to 2 and similar to 1.5 tighter than CMB alone. Our data set will further enable us to study the stellar initial mass function of the lens galaxies, and the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. This program will provide a foundation for extracting cosmological distances from the hundreds of time-delay lenses that are expected to be discovered in current and future surveys.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/263b4b153c5cc34fe014c0c234de753d25d882b1

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Citations in the corpus

TDCOSMO. I. An exploration of systematic uncertainties in the inference of $H_0$ from time-delay cosmography (2019, methodology): “Adopting these data and methodology, the H0LiCOW collaboration (Suyu et al. 2017) is analyzing a sample of lenses suitable for high-precision H0 measurements.”
The Carnegie-Chicago Hubble Program. VIII. An Independent Determination of the Hubble Constant Based on the Tip of the Red Giant Branch (2019, methodology): “…lens systems for measuring H0 will provide a completely independent measure of H0 and shows promise for a 1% determination of H0 in future years as hundreds, and possibly thousands, of time-delay lens systems are discovered in future surveys (e.g., the H0LiCOW program; Suyu et al. 2017).”
Sounds Discordant: Classical Distance Ladder and ΛCDM-based Determinations of the Cosmological Sound Horizon (2018, background): “We also note that SLTDs can be used to calibrate the BAO measurements, so we convert the H0LiCOW result into a sound horizon constraint.”
TDCOSMO IV: Hierarchical time-delay cosmography -- joint inference of the Hubble constant and galaxy density profiles (2020, methodology): “The seven measurements follow an approximately standard (although evolving over time) procedure (see e.g. Suyu et al. 2017) and incorporate single-aperture stellar kinematics measurements for each lens.”
The trouble with H0 (2016, methodology): “Effort in this direction is represented by the H0LiCOW project [23].”
H0LiCOW – XIII. A 2.4 per cent measurement of H0 from lensed quasars: 5.3σ tension between early- and late-Universe probes (2019, background): “The H0 Lenses in COSMOGRAIL’s Wellspring (H0LiCOW) collaboration (Suyu et al. 2017, hereafter H0LiCOW I) has provided the strongest constraints on H0 to date from time-delay cosmography.”