Conveners
Exploring the Universe with strong gravitational lensing: Thursday block 1
- Piero Rosati (University of Ferrara)
- Massimo Meneghetti (INAF Bologna)
Exploring the Universe with strong gravitational lensing: Exploring the Universe with strong gravitational lensing
- Massimo Meneghetti (INAF Bologna)
- Piero Rosati (University of Ferrara)
Description
In recent years, the use of gravitational lensing techniques, particularly in the strong regime, has made great strides in addressing several outstanding questions in astrophysics and cosmology. A new generation of high-quality data from space and ground has driven a transition to high-precision strong lensing modeling of galaxy and cluster-scale lensing systems. As a result, robust and detailed reconstructions of the total mass distribution of galaxies and cluster cores have provided the means to test structure formation scenarios by comparing the results of cosmological simulations with mass maps inferred from strong-lensing data. In addition, the observed time delay among multiple lensed images of time-varying background sources in an increasing number of systems has opened new competitive ways to determine the expansion rate and geometry of the Universe. Lastly, the lensing magnification and amplification effects provided by massive clusters have allowed the exploitation of these systems as cosmic telescopes, particularly in the new JWST era, enabling the detection and spectroscopic characterization of primordial galaxies.
Upcoming experiments such as Euclid, LSST, and Roman are poised to revolutionize the field of strong lensing by increasing the known number of gravitational lensing events, where the aforementioned techniques can be applied, by orders of magnitude. In this session, we will delve into the exciting perspectives and prospects of utilizing strong lensing techniques in the coming years, exploring how upcoming experiments and advancements will continue to shape our understanding of the cosmos through gravitational lensing phenomena.
The advent of a new generation of observational facilities, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Euclid space telescope, has just inaugurated a new era of discoveries that are destined to revolutionize all fields of astrophysics, including strong gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters. The JWST’s spectrophotometric data, of unprecedented spatial resolution and sensitivity,...
Strong gravitational lensing is one of the most promising methods for studying the nature of dark matter. It allows one to detect low-mass dark haloes within the haloes of lens galaxies and along their line of sight, providing a quantitative test of the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm in a halo mass regime and distances that are not accessible to any other technique. So far, two detections of...
I will briefly summarize ongoing activities related to Strong Gravitational lensing, and illustrate a few very recent results of strong lensing events uncovered in the Euclid ERO data.
Current small scale cosmological controversies are coming down to the precision level of observations. The key point is whether a better understanding of baryonic physics, dark matter physics, or both is required to address these challenges. In this talk, I will describe how interferometric observations of strong gravitational lenses in the radio domain are uniquely contributing to address...
The percent precision achieved on the values of the cosmological parameters defining the expansion rate and the geometry of the Universe has recently revealed some tension between the measurements of the value of the Hubble constant (H0) from local and early-Universe cosmological probes. The best strategy forward today is to develop independent and complementary techniques to measure H0, and...
Strong gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters is one of the most powerful tools to accurately probe the dark matter mass distribution in the densest regions of such structures, where multiple images are formed, and to test the currently accepted ɅCDM cosmological paradigm. Present and future observational facilities, such as the Euclid space telescope and the Vera Rubin observatory, are...
In recent years, the precision of the Hubble constant ($H_0$) measurements has significantly improved, revealing some discrepancy between the estimates inferred from local and early-universe probes. This tension might be ascribed to the presence of unknown systematic effects or some deviation from the current cosmological model (flat $\Lambda$CDM), thus pointing to the need of new physics....
In the era of precision cosmology, where the accuracy of observational probes and the rigorous control of systematic uncertainties are of paramount importance, exploring the synergies among different methods can play a key role. Typically this is done on a global level and the results from different probes, coming from various datasets, are combined to increase the precision of the...
