The CFHTLS strong lensing legacy survey - I. Survey overview and T0002 release sample

By R. Cabanac, C. Alard, M. Dantel-Fort, B. Fort, R. Gavazzi, P. Gomez, Jean-Paul Kneib, O. Fèvre, Y. Mellier, R. Pell'o and 11 more. 2006

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AIMS: We present data from the CFHTLS Strong Lensing Legacy Survey (SL2S). Due to the unsurpassed combined depth, area and image quality of the Canada-France-Hawaii Legacy Survey it is becoming possible to uncover a large, statistically well-defined sample of strong gravitational lenses which spans the dark halo mass spectrum predicted by the concordance model from galaxy to cluster haloes. METHODS: We describe the development of several automated procedures to find strong lenses of various mass regimes in CFHTLS images. RESULTS: The preliminary sample of about 40 strong lensing candidates discovered in the CFHTLS T0002 release, covering an effective field of view of 28 deg$^2$ is presented. These strong lensing systems were discovered using an automated search and consist mainly of gravitational arc systems with splitting angles between 2 and 15 arcsec. This sample shows for the first time that it is possible to uncover a large population of strong lenses from galaxy groups with typical halo masses of about $10^{13}h^{-1}M_\odot$. We discuss the future evolution of the SL2S project and its main scientific aims for the next 3 years, in particular our observational strategy to extract the hundreds of gravitational rings also present in these fields.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c69ca0430e250baccaf2906f97432b04f3cdff7

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Citations in the corpus

The Sloan Lens ACS Survey. VI. Discovery and Analysis of a Double Einstein Ring (2008, background): “…known galaxy-scale gravitational lens systems has increased well beyond a hundred as a result of a number of dedicated efforts exploiting a variety of techniques (e.g. Warren et al. 1996; Ratnatunga et al. 1999; Kochanek et al. 1999; Myers et al. 2003; Bolton et al. 2004; Cabanac et al. 2007).”
Gravitational lensing (2010, background): “Automatic search algorithms for arcs [63, 210, 271, 432] calibrated on simulated images [331] and applied to upcoming wide-field surveys will improve the situation in the near future.”
Gravitationally lensed quasars and supernovae in future wide-field optical imaging surveys (2010, background): “…hundred strong lens systems produced by massive galaxies have been discovered to date, with quasars (e.g. Inada et al. 2008), radio sources (e.g. Browne et al. 2003; Myers et al. 2003) and galaxies (e.g. Cabanac et al. 2007; Bolton et al. 2008; Faure et al. 2008) appearing as source populations.”
QUANTIFYING QUASAR VARIABILITY AS PART OF A GENERAL APPROACH TO CLASSIFYING CONTINUOUSLY VARYING SOURCES (2009, background): “…Becker et al. 2005), searches for both local (LOSS; Filippenko et al. 2001) and cosmologically distant (e.g., SDSS, Sako et al. 2008; CFHTLS, Cabanac et al. 2007; Essence, Miknaitis et al. 2007) supernovae, all-sky variability surveys (e.g., ASAS, Pojmański 1997; QUEST, Vivas et al. 2004;…”
A Bayesian approach to strong lensing modelling of galaxy clusters (2007, background): “Although rare in current surveys, strong lensing events are expected to number as many as a few hundred thousand over the whole sky (Cabanac et al. 2007).”
Strong-lensing optical depths in a ΛCDM universe – II. The influence of the stellar mass in galaxies (2007, background): “This includes the inner few arcseconds of most lenses, regions which dominate many surveys for strong lensing (Myers et al. 2003; Oguri et al. 2006; Bolton et al. 2006; Willis et al. 2006; Cabanac et al. 2007).”