Space Warps Talk

Potential Lenses, Followup etc.

  • MrBill by MrBill

    I have processed over 20,000 images identifying over 2,000 potential lenses. Soooo, how do we find out if multiple users have identified the same potential lenses and when/if such will be pursued to determine if such are real lenses? This exercise is interesting; however, other than a rare response to a comment about a potential lense, I do not see any way to get feedback as to whether our contributions are of any benefit.

    Thanks to anyone who responds to the question.

    Posted

  • MrBill by MrBill

    Any chance of getting a response?

    Posted

  • Budgieye by Budgieye moderator

    This really should be a scientist answering this. However, I will answer, and a scientist can mark me on how well I do.

    First of all, congratulations on looking at so many images. That is a real achievement.

    I don't know how long the collection phase will go on, but let us say 3 months. Then it would take another 3 months to put the best candidates in some sort of order. That would be a difficult job, I wouldn't like to do that. I would think that the candidates would have to be modeled to see if they are a reasonable fit. The colours would have to be correct. They have to be large enough to be useful, bright enough to see, and with an image on both sides of the lens.

    Then a paper will be written, and probably some citizen scientists like yourself will be on a thank you list at the end of the paper, and you would be contacted at that time to ask your permission to put your name or your avatar name in print. If a lens is important, possibly the first 10 people to click on it will get special mention. It takes about year to publish a paper if all goes well. After the paper is published, the location of the lens in the sky will be made public. At this stage they are still lens candidates. Most will remain candidates until they are proven to be real lenses.

    Then someone must look at the best candidates with Hubble space telescope (if it is still around) or James Webb space telescope (if it is in orbit), and that would take 2 years to write a proposal and wait your turn. Also, a good ground telescope will be needed to take a spectrum of the lensing galaxy and the lensed galaxy, to make sure that the distances away are correct.

    I'm sure a new set of images will be found for us citizen scientists to analyse before then.

    In the meantime, I am trying to put some some information about the previously published lenses, like #SA66, to give some educational background to some lenses. see The colour of lensing and lensed galaxies.

    http://talk.spacewarps.org/#/boards/BSW0000002/discussions/DSW000044z

    Posted

  • MrBill by MrBill

    Budgieye
    Thanks for your response.

    Posted

  • anupreeta by anupreeta scientist, admin

    @MrBill
    In general, please take a look at our blog from time to time - http://blog.spacewarps.org/
    Some of your questions are answered here - http://blog.spacewarps.org/2013/05/27/sim-city/
    and the others will be answered in future blog posts.. we are working on it! 😃

    Posted