Discovery of the first quadruple gravitationally lensed quasar candidate with Pan-STARRS
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by
Budgieye
moderator
Not confirmed by spectroscopy, but looks good.
Serendipitous discovery, which means it was found by accident, just like we find things.I posted this first in Galaxy Zoo Talk
Discovery of the first quadruple gravitationally lensed quasar candidate with Pan-STARRS https://talk.galaxyzoo.org/#/boards/BGZ0000004/discussions/DGZ0002qil
C. T. Berghea, G. J. Nelson, C. E. Rusu, C. R. Keeton, R. P. Dudik
(Submitted on 23 May 2017 (v1), last revised 11 Jul 2017 (this
version, v2)) We report the serendipitous discovery of the first
gravitationally lensed quasar candidate from Pan-STARRS. The grizy
images reveal four point-like images with magnitudes between 14.9 mag
and 18.1 mag. The colors of the point sources are similar, and they
are more consistent with quasars than with stars or galaxies. The
lensing galaxy is detected in the izy bands, with an inferred
photometric redshift of ~0.6, lower than that of the point sources. We
successfully model the system with a singular isothermal ellipsoid
with shear, using the relative positions of the five objects as
constraints. While the brightness ranking of the point sources is
consistent with that of the model, we find discrepancies between the
model-predicted and observed fluxes, likely due to microlensing by
stars and millilensing due to the dark matter substructure. In order
to fully confirm the gravitational lens nature of this system and add
it to the small but growing number of the powerful probes of cosmology
and astrophysics represented by quadruply lensed quasars, we require
further spectroscopy and high-resolution imaging.https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08359
PanSTARRS
lensing galaxy visible in the middle? y band filter, so very red, so very redshifted, so very far away, z greater than 0.1
outside the SDSS dr14 footprint
Posted