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Serendipitous discovery of quadruply imaged quasars : two diamonds.

Lucey, John R. and Schechter, Paul L. and Smith, Russell J. and Anguita, T. (2018) 'Serendipitous discovery of quadruply imaged quasars : two diamonds.', Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society., 476 (1). pp. 927-932.

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.

Item Type:Article
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Status:Peer-reviewed
Publisher Web site:https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty243
Publisher 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.
Date accepted:12 January 2018
Date deposited:03 April 2018
Date of first online publication:06 February 2018
Date first made open access:No date available

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