The Beyond Ultra-deep Frontier Fields and Legacy Observations (BUFFALO) is a 101 orbit + 101 parallel Cycle 25 Hubble Space Telescope Treasury program taking data from 2018-2020. BUFFALO will expand existing coverage of the Hubble Frontier Fields (HFF) in WFC3/IR F105W, F125W, and F160W and ACS/WFC F606W and F814W around each of the six HFF clusters and flanking fields. This additional area has not been observed by HST but is already covered by deep multi-wavelength datasets, including Spitzer and Chandra. As with the original HFF program, BUFFALO is designed to take advantage of gravitational lensing from massive clusters to simultaneously find high-redshift galaxies which would otherwise lie below HST detection limits and model foreground clusters to study properties of dark matter and galaxy assembly. The expanded area will provide a first opportunity to study both cosmic variance at high redshift and galaxy assembly in the outskirts of the large HFF clusters. Five additional orbits are reserved for transient followup. BUFFALO data including mosaics, value-added catalogs and cluster mass distribution models will be released via MAST on a regular basis, as the observations and analysis are completed for the six individual clusters.
We present a statistical weak-lensing magnification analysis on an optically selected sample of 3029 \texttt{CAMIRA} galaxy clusters with richness $N>15$ at redshift $0.2\leq z <1.1$ in the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) survey. We use two distinct populations of color-selected, flux-limited background galaxies, namely the low-$z$ and high-$z$ samples at mean redshifts of $\approx1.1$ and $\approx1.4$, respectively, from which to measure the weak-lensing magnification signal by accounting for cluster contamination as well as masking effects. Our magnification bias measurements are found to be uncontaminated according to validation tests against the "null-test" samples for which the net magnification bias is expected to vanish. The magnification bias for the full \texttt{CAMIRA} sample is detected at a significance level of $9.51\sigma$, which is dominated by the high-$z$ background. We forward-model the observed magnification data to constrain the normalization of the richness-to-mass ($N$--$M$) relation for the \texttt{CAMIRA} sample with informative priors on other parameters. The resulting scaling relation is $N\propto {M_{500}}^{0.92\pm0.13} (1 + z)^{-0.48\pm0.69}$, with a characteristic richness of $N=\left(17.72\pm2.60\right)$ and intrinsic log-normal scatter of $0.15\pm0.07$ at $M_{500} = 10^{14}h^{-1}M_{\odot}$. With the derived $N$--$M$ relation, we provide magnification-calibrated mass estimates of individual \texttt{CAMIRA} clusters, with the typical uncertainty of $\approx39\%$ and $\approx32\%$ at richness$\approx20$ and $\approx40$, respectively. We further compare our magnification-inferred $N$--$M$ relation with those from the shear-based results in the literature, finding good agreement.
Cadenced optical imaging surveys in the next decade will be capable of detecting time-varying galaxy-scale strong gravitational lenses in large numbers, increasing the size of the statistically well-defined samples of multiply-imaged quasars by two orders of magnitude, and discovering the first strongly-lensed supernovae. We carry out a detailed calculation of the likely yields of several planned surveys, using realistic distributions for the lens and source properties and taking magnification bias and image configuration detectability into account. We find that upcoming wide-field synoptic surveys should detect several thousand lensed quasars. In particular, the LSST should find 8000 lensed quasars, 3000 of which will have well-measured time delays, and also ~130 lensed supernovae, which is compared with ~15 lensed supernovae predicted to be found by the JDEM. We predict the quad fraction to be ~15% for the lensed quasars and ~30% for the lensed supernovae. Generating a mock catalogue of around 1500 well-observed double-image lenses, we compute the available precision on the Hubble constant and the dark energy equation parameters for the time delay distance experiment (assuming priors from Planck): the predicted marginalised 68% confidence intervals are \sigma(w_0)=0.15, \sigma(w_a)=0.41, and \sigma(h)=0.017. While this is encouraging in the sense that these uncertainties are only 50% larger than those predicted for a space-based type-Ia supernova sample, we show how the dark energy figure of merit degrades with decreasing knowledge of the the lens mass distribution. (Abridged)
Young galaxies, potentially responsible for the last major phase-transition of the Universe, appear brighter than expected and go through rapid bursty phases where copious amounts of ionizing radiation and feedback are produced. However, the stellar components of the majority of these reionization--era galaxies remain spatially unresolved. In this letter, we report the direct discovery of young massive star clusters in the strongly lensed galaxy SPT0615-JD1 (dubbed the Cosmic Gems arc) at redshift $z\sim10.2_{-0.2}^{+0.2}$ when the universe was $\sim 460$ Myr old. Recently observed with JWST/NIRCam imaging, the Cosmic Gems arc stretches over 5\arcsec\, (Bradley in prep.) revealing 5 individual massive young star clusters with lensing-corrected sizes of $\sim$1 pc, located in a region smaller than 70 pc. These Cosmic Gems produce $\sim60$ % of the FUV light of the host, and have very low dust attenuation (A$_V<$0.5 mag) and metallicity ($\sim$ 5% solar), intrinsic masses of $\sim10^6$ M$_{\odot}$, and ages younger than 35 Myr. Their stellar surface densities are around $10^5$~M$_{\odot}$/pc$^2$, three orders of magnitude higher than typical star clusters in the local universe. Despite the uncertainties inherent to the lensing model, their dynamical ages are consistent with being gravitationally bound stellar systems that could potentially evolve into globular clusters. They would be the earliest known proto-globular clusters, formed less than 500 Myr after the Big Bang. This discovery opens a new window into the physical processes that take place in reionization-era bursty galaxies, showing that star cluster formation and clustered stellar feedback might play an important role for reionization.
We present the first step toward deriving cosmological constraints through the abundances of galaxy clusters selected in a 510deg2 weak-lensing aperture mass map, constructed with the Year-Three shear catalog from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program. We adopt a conservative source galaxy selection to construct a sample of 129 weak-lensing peaks with a signal-to-noise ratio above 4.7. We use semi-analytical injection simulations to derive the selection function and the mass–observable relation of our sample. These results take into account complicated uncertainties associated with weak-lensing measurements, such as the non-uniform survey depth and the complex survey geometry, projection effects from uncorrelated large-scale structures, and the intrinsic alignment of source galaxies. We also propose a novel modeling framework to make parts of the mass–observable relation insensitive to assumed cosmological parameters. Such a framework not only offers a great computational advantage to cosmological studies, but can also benefit future astrophysical studies using shear-selected clusters. Our results are an important step toward utilizing these cluster samples that are constructed nearly independent of any baryonic assumptions in upcoming deep-and-wide lensing surveys from the Vera Rubin Observatory, Euclid, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
We study the impact of lens galaxy environments on the image separation distribution of lensed quasars. We account for both environmental convergence and shear, using a joint distribution derived from galaxy formation models calibrated by galaxy-galaxy lensing data and number counts of massive elliptical galaxies. We find that the external field enhances lensing probabilities, particularly, at large image separations; the increase is ∼30 per cent at θ= 3 arcsec and ∼200 per cent at θ= 5 arcsec, when we adopt a power-law source luminosity function F(L) ∝L−2.1. The enhancement is mainly driven by convergence, which boosts both the image separation and magnification bias (for a fixed lens galaxy mass). These effects have been neglected in previous studies of lens statistics. Turning the problem around, we derive the posterior convergence and shear distributions and point out that they are strong functions of image separation; lens systems with larger image separations are more likely to lie in dense environments.
Gravitational lensing by clusters of galaxies offers a powerful probe of their structure and mass distribution. Deriving a lens magnification map for a galaxy cluster is a classic inversion problem and many methods have been developed over the past two decades to solve it. Several research groups have developed techniques independently to map the predominantly dark matter distribution in cluster lenses. While these methods have all provided remarkably high precision mass maps, particularly with exquisite imaging data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the reconstructions themselves have never been directly compared. In this paper, we report the results of comparing various independent lens modeling techniques employed by individual research groups in the community. Here we present for the first time a detailed and robust comparison of methodologies for fidelity, accuracy and precision. For this collaborative exercise, the lens modeling community was provided simulated cluster images -- of two clusters Ares and Hera -- that mimic the depth and resolution of the ongoing HST Frontier Fields. The results of the submitted reconstructions with the un-blinded true mass profile of these two clusters are presented here. Parametric, free-form and hybrid techniques have been deployed by the participating groups and we detail the strengths and trade-offs in accuracy and systematics that arise for each methodology. We note in conclusion that lensing reconstruction methods produce reliable mass distributions that enable the use of clusters as extremely valuable astrophysical laboratories and cosmological probes.
Abstract We present an optically-selected cluster catalog from the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) Subaru Strategic Program. The HSC images are sufficiently deep to detect cluster member galaxies down to M* ∼ 1010.2 M⊙ even at z ∼ 1, allowing a reliable cluster detection at such high redshifts. We apply the CAMIRA algorithm to the HSC Wide S16A dataset covering ∼232 deg2 to construct a catalog of 1921 clusters at redshift 0.1 < z < 1.1 and richness ${\skew7\hat{N}}_{\rm mem}>15$ that roughly corresponds to M200m ≳ 1014 h−1 M⊙. We confirm good cluster photometric redshift performance, with the bias and the scatter in Δz/(1 + z) being better than 0.005 and 0.01, respectively, over most of the redshift range. We compare our cluster catalog with large X-ray cluster catalogs from the XXL and XMM-LSS (the XMM Large Scale Structure) surveys and find good correlation between richness and X-ray properties.We also study the mis-centering effect from the distribution of offsets between optical and X-ray cluster centers. We confirm the high (>0.9) completeness and purity for high-mass clusters by analyzing mock galaxy catalogs.
We measure the small-scale (comoving separation 10 ≲ rp ≲ 200 h−1 kpc) two-point correlation function of quasars using a sample of 26 spectroscopically confirmed binary quasars at 0.6 < z < 2.2 from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Lens Search (SQLS). Thanks to careful candidate selections and extensive follow-up observations of the SQLS, which are aimed at constructing a complete quasar lens sample, our sample of binary quasars is also expected to be nearly complete within a specified range of angular separations and redshifts. The measured small-scale correlation function rises steeply towards smaller scales, which is consistent with earlier studies based on incomplete or smaller binary quasar samples. We find that the quasar correlation function can be fitted by a power law reasonably well over 4 orders of magnitude, with the best-fitting slope of ξ(r) ∝ r−1.92. We interpret the measured correlation function within the framework of the halo occupation distribution (HOD). We propose a simple model that assumes a constant fraction of quasars that appear as satellites in dark matter haloes, and find that measured small-scale clustering signals constrain the satellite fraction to ƒsat = 0.0540.017−0.016 for a singular isothermal sphere number density profile of satellites. We note that the HOD modelling appears to underpredict clustering signals at the smallest separations of rp∼ 10 h−1 kpc unless we assume very steep number density profiles (such as a Navarro—Frenk—White profile with the concentration parameter cvir≳30), which may be suggestive of enhanced quasar activities by direct interactions.
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