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Serendipitous discovery of quadruply imaged quasars: two diamonds

Lucey, John R.; Schechter, Paul L.; Smith, Russell J.; Anguita, T.

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Authors

Paul L. Schechter

T. Anguita



Abstract

Gravitationally lensed quasars are powerful and versatile astrophysical tools, but they are challengingly rare. In particular, only ∼25 well-characterized quadruple systems are known to date. To refine the target catalogue for the forthcoming Taipan Galaxy Survey, the images of a large number of sources are being visually inspected in order to identify objects that are confused by a foreground star or galaxies that have a distinct multicomponent structure. An unexpected by-product of this work has been the serendipitous discovery of about a dozen galaxies that appear to be lensing quasars, i.e. pairs or quartets of foreground stellar objects in close proximity to the target source. Here, we report two diamond-shaped systems. Follow-up spectroscopy with the IMACS instrument on the 6.5m Magellan Baade telescope confirms one of these as a z = 1.975 quasar quadruply lensed by a double galaxy at z = 0.293. Photometry from publicly available survey images supports the conclusion that the other system is a highly sheared quadruply imaged quasar. In starting with objects thought to be galaxies, our lens finding technique complements the conventional approach of first identifying sources with quasar-like colours and subsequently finding evidence of lensing.

Citation

Lucey, J. R., Schechter, P. L., Smith, R. J., & Anguita, T. (2018). Serendipitous discovery of quadruply imaged quasars: two diamonds. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 476(1), 927-932. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty243

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jan 12, 2018
Online Publication Date Feb 6, 2018
Publication Date May 1, 2018
Deposit Date Apr 3, 2018
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Print ISSN 0035-8711
Electronic ISSN 1365-2966
Publisher Royal Astronomical Society
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 476
Issue 1
Pages 927-932
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty243
Related Public URLs https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.02674

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Copyright Statement
This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ©: 2018 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.






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