THE SLOAN LENS ACS SURVEY. IX. COLORS, LENSING, AND STELLAR MASSES OF EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES

By M. Auger, T. Treu, A. Bolton, R. Gavazzi, Leon V. E. Koopmans, P. J. Marshall, K. Bundy, L. A. Moustakas. 2009

210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the current photometric data set for the Sloan Lens ACS (SLACS) Survey, including Hubble Space Telescope (HST) photometry from Advanced Camera for Surveys, WFPC2, and NICMOS. These data have enabled the confirmation of an additional 15 grade “A” (certain) lens systems, bringing the number of SLACS grade “A” lenses to 85; including 13 grade “B” (likely) systems, SLACS has identified nearly 100 lenses and lens candidates. Approximately 80% of the grade “A” systems have elliptical morphologies while ∼10% show spiral structure; the remaining lenses have lenticular morphologies. Spectroscopic redshifts for the lens and source are available for every system, making SLACS the largest homogeneous data set of galaxy-scale lenses to date. We have created lens models using singular isothermal ellipsoid mass distributions for the 11 new systems that are dominated by a single mass component and where the multiple images are detected with sufficient signal to noise; these models give a high precision measurement of the mass within the Einstein radius of each lens. We have developed a novel Bayesian stellar population analysis code to determine robust stellar masses with accurate error estimates. We apply this code to deep, high-resolution HST imaging and determine stellar masses with typical statistical errors of 0.1 dex; we find that these stellar masses are unbiased compared to estimates obtained using SDSS photometry, provided that informative priors are used. The stellar masses range from 1010.5 to 1011.8 M☉ and the typical stellar mass fraction within the Einstein radius is 0.4, assuming a Chabrier initial mass function. The ensemble properties of the SLACS lens galaxies, e.g., stellar masses and projected ellipticities, appear to be indistinguishable from other SDSS galaxies with similar stellar velocity dispersions. This further supports that SLACS lenses are representative of the overall population of massive early-type galaxies with M* ≳ 1011 M☉, and are therefore an ideal data set to investigate the kpc-scale distribution of luminous and dark matter in galaxies out to z ∼ 0.5.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ecology, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/27ec01182679e72b687e5174caa4785ea5e9f942

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Citations in the corpus

H0LiCOW – I. H0 Lenses in COSMOGRAIL's wellspring: program overview (2016, methodology): “By separately determining the stellar mass based on either (1) stellar population synthesis using multiband photometry (e.g., Auger et al. 2009; Treu et al. 2010; Oguri et al. 2014), or (2) identification/characterization of spectral features (e.g., van Dokkum & Conroy 2010; Conroy & van Dokkum…”
PRIMUS: CONSTRAINTS ON STAR FORMATION QUENCHING AND GALAXY MERGING, AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE STELLAR MASS FUNCTION FROM z = 0–1 (2013, background): “…iSEDfit, a suite of routines written in the idl programming language to determine within a simplified Bayesian framework the stellar masses, SFRs, and other physical properties of galaxies from their observed broadband SEDs (e.g., Kauffmann et al. 2003a; Salim et al. 2007; Auger et al. 2009).”
THE INITIAL MASS FUNCTION OF EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2010, unknown): “The median values of α for each lens are given in Table 1, together with other key properties of the lens galaxies, taken from Auger et al. (2009) and references therein.”
TDCOSMO. I. An exploration of systematic uncertainties in the inference of $H_0$ from time-delay cosmography (2019, background): “About 90% of galaxy-scale lenses are early-type galaxies (Auger et al. 2009), which satisfy very tight correlations between their observable properties (Auger et al. 2010).”
Dark halo response and the stellar initial mass function in early-type and late-type galaxies (2010, methodology): “8 we show results using data from SLACS survey as presented in Auger et al. (2009, 2010b).”
THE SLOAN LENS ACS SURVEY. X. STELLAR, DYNAMICAL, AND TOTAL MASS CORRELATIONS OF MASSIVE EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2010, methodology): “We use a sample of early-type gravitational lenses from the Sloan Lens ACS Survey (SLACS; Bolton et al. 2006, 2008a; Auger et al. 2009) to investigate the scaling relations of ETGs, and in particular we look at the relationships between total and stellar mass with respect to the other structural…”
The ATLAS3D project – XX. Mass–size and mass–σ distributions of early-type galaxies: bulge fraction drives kinematics, mass-to-light ratio, molecular gas fraction and stellar initial mass function (2012, methodology): “Comparing the stellar mass from the lens model to the one from population, based on multicolour photometry (Auger et al. 2009), they found that the data prefer a Salpeter-like normalization of the IMF.”
Two-dimensional kinematics of SLACS lenses – III. Mass structure and dynamics of early-type lens galaxies beyond z ≃ 0.1 (2011, methodology): “These objects are all early-type galaxies, with the exception of J1251−0208, which is morphologically classified by Auger et al. (2009) as a late-type galaxy.”
THE DENSITY PROFILES OF MASSIVE, RELAXED GALAXY CLUSTERS. II. SEPARATING LUMINOUS AND DARK MATTER IN CLUSTER CORES (2012, background): “This is because the unknown IMF is the dominant source of uncertainty in the absolute mass scale for stellar population synthesis models, especially for old galaxies (e.g., Bell & de Jong 2001; Bundy et al. 2005; Cappellari et al. 2006; Auger et al. 2009; Grillo et al. 2009; Stott et al. 2010).”
THE BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY OF SDSS-III (2012, result): “In an approach similar to that from the Sloan Lens Advanced Camera for Surveys (SLACS; Bolton et al. 2006, 2008; Auger et al. 2009), Brownstein et al. (2012) present a catalog of strong galaxy-galaxy gravitational lens systems discovered spectroscopically in the CMASS sample and observed with HST.”
Galaxy Masses: A Review (2013, methodology): “…(Bolton et al. 2006a; Treu et al. 2006; Koopmans et al. 2006; Gavazzi et al. 2007; Bolton et al. 2008a; Gavazzi et al. 2008; Bolton et al. 2008b; Auger et al. 2009; Treu et al. 2009; Auger et al. 2010a; Newton et al. 2011) were selected from the spectroscopic database of the SDSS based on the…”
TDCOSMO IV: Hierarchical time-delay cosmography -- joint inference of the Hubble constant and galaxy density profiles (2020, methodology): “Shajib et al. (2020b) first select 50 SLACS lenses for uniform modeling from the sample of 85 lenses presented by Auger et al. (2009).”
Inference of the cold dark matter substructure mass function at z = 0.2 using strong gravitational lenses (2014, methodology): “From Auger et al. (2009) we derive a stellar mass ofM∗ = 1.4×109M⊙ for a Chabrier initial mass function and M∗ = 2.5 × 109M⊙ for a Salpeter one.”
THE DENSITY PROFILES OF MASSIVE, RELAXED GALAXY CLUSTERS. I. THE TOTAL DENSITY OVER THREE DECADES IN RADIUS (2012, methodology): “The resulting stellar masses were compared to those of Auger et al. (2009), which were based on carefully constructed priors.”