DISSECTING THE GRAVITATIONAL LENS B1608+656. II. PRECISION MEASUREMENTS OF THE HUBBLE CONSTANT, SPATIAL CURVATURE, AND THE DARK ENERGY EQUATION OF STATE

By Sherry H. Suyu, P. J. Marshall, M. Auger, Stefan Hilbert, R. Blandford, Leon V. E. Koopmans, C. Fassnacht, T. Treu. 2009

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Strong gravitational lens systems with measured time delays between the multiple images provide a method for measuring the “time-delay distance” to the lens, and thus the Hubble constant. We present a Bayesian analysis of the strong gravitational lens system B1608+656, incorporating (1) new, deep Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations, (2) a new velocity-dispersion measurement of 260 ± 15 km s−1 for the primary lens galaxy, and (3) an updated study of the lens’ environment. Our analysis of the HST images takes into account the extended source surface brightness, and the dust extinction and optical emission by the interacting lens galaxies. When modeling the stellar dynamics of the primary lens galaxy, the lensing effect, and the environment of the lens, we explicitly include the total mass distribution profile logarithmic slope γ′ and the external convergence κext; we marginalize over these parameters, assigning well-motivated priors for them, and so turn the major systematic errors into statistical ones. The HST images provide one such prior, constraining the lens mass density profile logarithmic slope to be γ′ = 2.08 ± 0.03; a combination of numerical simulations and photometric observations of the B1608+656 field provides an estimate of the prior for κext: 0.10+0.08−0.05. This latter distribution dominates the final uncertainty on H0. Fixing the cosmological parameters at Ωm = 0.3, ΩΛ = 0.7, and w = −1 in order to compare with previous work on this system, we find H0 = 70.6+3.1−3.1 km s−1 Mpc−1. The new data provide an increase in precision of more than a factor of 2, even including the marginalization over κext. Relaxing the prior probability density function for the cosmological parameters to that derived from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) five-year data set, we find that the B1608+656 data set breaks the degeneracy between Ωm and ΩΛ at w = −1 and constrains the curvature parameter to be −0.031 < Ωk < 0.009 (95% CL), a level of precision comparable to that afforded by the current Type Ia SNe sample. Asserting a flat spatial geometry, we find that, in combination with WMAP, H0 = 69.7+4.9−5.0 km s−1 Mpc−1 and w = −0.94+0.17−0.19 (68% CL), suggesting that the observations of B1608+656 constrain w as tightly as the current Baryon Acoustic Oscillation data do.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae6f620c6b17cc9404e0088f75a8fffadafc161b

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Citations in the corpus

THE SLOAN LENS ACS SURVEY. X. STELLAR, DYNAMICAL, AND TOTAL MASS CORRELATIONS OF MASSIVE EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES (2010, methodology): “Details of how the fits are implemented can be found in Suyu et al. (2009) (also see Koopmans et al. 2006, 2009), although for this analysis we only use our baseline models, characterized by a Hernquist (1990) model for the stellar distribution and no anisotropy of the stellar orbits.”
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN GALAXIES AND DARK MATTER STRUCTURES IN THE LOCAL UNIVERSE (2012, background): “…the precise determination of galaxy bias required for clustering and lensing constraints, understanding the galaxy content of clusters for cluster cosmology (Rozo et al. 2010; Tinker et al. 2012), and modeling the mass along the line of sight to strong lensing time delays (Suyu et al. 2010).”
SEVEN-YEAR WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE (WMAP) OBSERVATIONS: COSMOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION (2010, background): “Using WMAP+BAO+H0, we find w = −1.10 ± 0.14 (68% CL), which improves to w = −1.08 ± 0.13 (68% CL) if we add the time-delay distance out to the lens system B1608+656 (Suyu et al. 2010, see Section 3.2.5).”
LSST: From Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products (2008, background): “• Time delays of galaxy-scale lensed quasars will allow one to measure Hubble’s constant (e.g. Suyu et al. 2010) in hundreds or thousands of systems; subpercent level precision in H(z) should be achievable (Coe & Moustakas 2009), providing a further independent dark energy probe.”
THE CENTRAL SLOPE OF DARK MATTER CORES IN DWARF GALAXIES: SIMULATIONS VERSUS THINGS (2010, neutral): “…M200 as follows, M200 [M⊙]=200× 3H20 8πG × 4πR3200 3 ≃ 100× H20 G × ( V200 10H0 )3 ≃ 3.29× 105 × V 3200, (3) where H0 is the Hubble constant (70.6 kms −1Mpc−1; Suyu et al. 2010), G is the gravitational constant (4.3× 10−3 pcM−1⊙ km 2 s−2) and V200 in km s −1 is the rotation velocity at…”
THE ATACAMA COSMOLOGY TELESCOPE: COSMOLOGICAL PARAMETERS FROM THE 2008 POWER SPECTRUM (2010, background): “…astronomical data including Type Ia supernova (Hicken et al. 2009; Kessler et al. 2009), galaxy cluster measurements (Vikhlinin et al. 2009; Mantz et al. 2010b; Rozo et al. 2010) and gravitational lensing observations (Massey et al. 2007; Fu et al. 2008; Schrabback et al. 2010; Suyu et al. 2010).”
Galaxy Masses: A Review (2013, background): “This effect is usually accounted for as external shear and convergence and result in typical corrections of order a few percent to the strong lensing inference (e.g. Keeton et al. 1997; Treu et al. 2009; Suyu et al. 2010, 2013).”
H0LiCOW - V. New COSMOGRAIL time delays of HE 0435-1223: H0 to 3.8 per cent precision from strong lensing in a flat ΛCDM model (2016, methodology): “…by Suyu et al. (2010) and Suyu et al. (2013), re-weighting the WMAP and Planck posterior samples with the TDSL likelihoods from the analyses of B1608+656 (Suyu et al. 2010), RXJ1131−1231 (Suyu et al. 2014) and HE 0435−1223 (H0LiCOW Paper IV), for the set cosmological models described in Table 2.”
Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, background): “In the best cases, distance scale constraints at the ∼ 5% level, after marginalizing over uncertainties in the mass distribution, are achievable for an individual lens (e.g., Suyu et al. 2010, 2012a).”
Gravitationally lensed quasars and supernovae in future wide-field optical imaging surveys (2010, background): “Indeed, the feasibility of this has been nicely demonstrated, by e.g. Suyu et al. (2010) for B1608+656 and Fadely et al. (2010) for Q0957+561.”
H 0 revisited (2013, methodology): “In addition, other programmes are underway using geometrical methods, for example the Megamaser Cosmology Project (MCP) (Reid et al. 2013; Braatz et al. 2013) and the Cosmological Monitoring of Gravitational Lenses (COSMOGRAIL) project (Suyu et al. 2010, Courbin et al. 2011; Trewes et al. 2013).”
TDCOSMO. I. An exploration of systematic uncertainties in the inference of $H_0$ from time-delay cosmography (2019, methodology): “This means that if 1 The first lens system analyzed using the then newly developed lens modeling methods was not blinded (B1608+656), but the subsequent analyses of the other five lenses using similar methods were blinded.”
Gravitational lensing (2010, methodology): “From a detailed modelling of the same lens system, it is derived in [467] that H0 = 70.”