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Title: PICS: Simulations of Strong Gravitational Lensing in Galaxy Clusters

Journal Article · · The Astrophysical Journal (Online)
ORCiD logo [1];  [2];  [3]; ORCiD logo [2];  [4]; ORCiD logo [4];  [4];  [5]
  1. Univ. of Chicago, IL (United States). Dept. of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics; Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Lemont, IL (United States)
  2. Univ. of Chicago, IL (United States). Dept. of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
  3. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Lemont, IL (United States); Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (United States)
  4. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Lemont, IL (United States); Univ. of Chicago, IL (United States). Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
  5. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)

Gravitational lensing has become one of the most powerful tools available for investigating the “dark side” of the universe. Cosmological strong gravitational lensing, in particular, probes the properties of the dense cores of dark matter halos over decades in mass and offers the opportunity to study the distant universe at flux levels and spatial resolutions otherwise unavailable. Studies of strongly lensed variable sources offer even further scientific opportunities. One of the challenges in realizing the potential of strong lensing is to understand the statistical context of both the individual systems that receive extensive follow-up study, as well as that of the larger samples of strong lenses that are now emerging from survey efforts. Motivated by these challenges, we have developed an image simulation pipeline, Pipeline for Images of Cosmological Strong lensing (PICS), to generate realistic strong gravitational lensing signals from group- and cluster-scale lenses. PICS uses a low-noise and unbiased density estimator based on (resampled) Delaunay Tessellations to calculate the density field; lensed images are produced by ray-tracing images of actual galaxies from deep Hubble Space Telescope observations. Other galaxies, similarly sampled, are added to fill in the light cone. The pipeline further adds cluster member galaxies and foreground stars into the lensed images. The entire image ensemble is then observed using a realistic point-spread function that includes appropriate detector artifacts for bright stars. Noise is further added, including such non-Gaussian elements as noise window-paning from mosaiced observations, residual bad pixels, and cosmic rays. Overall, the aim is to produce simulated images that appear identical—to the eye (expert or otherwise)—to real observations in various imaging surveys.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF); Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States). Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC); National Science Foundation (NSF); Kavli Foundation
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-06CH11357; AC05-00OR22725; NSF PHY-1125897
OSTI ID:
1392012
Journal Information:
The Astrophysical Journal (Online), Vol. 828, Issue 1; ISSN 1538-4357
Publisher:
Institute of Physics (IOP)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 14 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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  • McLeod, Brian; Geary, John; Conroy, Maureen
  • Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Vol. 127, Issue 950 https://doi.org/10.1086/680687
journal April 2015
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Effects of the halo concentration distribution on strong-lensing optical depth and X-ray emission text January 2007
Realistic simulations of gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters: extracting arc parameters from mock DUNE images text January 2007
Weak Gravitational Lensing and its Cosmological Applications text January 2008
Automated detection of galaxy-scale gravitational lenses in high resolution imaging data text January 2008
What is the largest Einstein radius in the universe? text January 2008
Effects of Dark Matter Substructures on Gravitational Lensing: Results from the Aquarius Simulations text January 2009
Dissecting the Gravitational Lens B1608+656. II. Precision Measurements of the Hubble Constant, Spatial Curvature, and the Dark Energy Equation of State text January 2009
Impacts of Source Properties on Strong Lensing by Rich Galaxy Clusters text January 2009
Resolved Spectroscopy of Gravitationally-Lensed Galaxies: Recovering Coherent Velocity Fields in Sub-Luminous z~2-3 Galaxies text January 2009
The Redshift Distribution of Giant Arcs in the Sloan Giant Arcs Survey text January 2010
The Dark Matter Distribution in Abell 383: Evidence for a Shallow Density Cusp from Improved Lensing, Stellar Kinematic and X-ray Data text January 2011
Broadband Photometry of 105 Giant Arcs: Redshift Constraints and Implications for Giant Arc Statistics text January 2011
Stellar Populations of Highly Magnified Lensed Galaxies: Young Starbursts at z~2 text January 2011
The Rockstar Phase-Space Temporal Halo Finder and the Velocity Offsets of Cluster Cores text January 2011
Dark Matter Halo Profiles of Massive Clusters: Theory vs. Observations text January 2011
Lensing and X-ray mass estimates of clusters (SIMULATION) text January 2012
Cosmological parameter constraints from galaxy-galaxy lensing and galaxy clustering with the SDSS DR7 text January 2012
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Two accurate time-delay distances from strong lensing: Implications for cosmology text January 2012
Keck Spectroscopy of Gravitationally Lensed z=4 Galaxies: Improved Constraints on the Escape Fraction of Ionizing Photons text January 2013
Cosmology from gravitational lens time delays and Planck data text January 2013
Microlensing Discovery of a Tight, Low Mass-ratio Planetary-mass Object around an Old, Field Brown Dwarf text January 2013
Herschel-ATLAS: Modelling the first strong gravitational lenses text January 2013
Line-of-Sight Structure Toward Strong Lensing Galaxy Clusters text January 2013
RingFinder: automated detection of galaxy-scale gravitational lenses in ground-based multi-filter imaging data text January 2014
Space Warps II. New Gravitational Lens Candidates from the CFHTLS Discovered through Citizen Science text January 2015
The population of galaxy-galaxy strong lenses in forthcoming optical imaging surveys text January 2015
The Gini Coefficient as a Tool for Image Family Idenitification in Strong Lensing Systems with Multiple Images text January 2015
The Detection and Statistics of Giant Arcs Behind CLASH Clusters text January 2015
cD galaxy contribution to the strong lensing cross sections of galaxy clusters text January 2003
The Incidence of Strong-Lensing Clusters in the Red-Sequence Cluster Survey text January 2003
Simulating weak lensing by large scale structure text January 2003
Statistics of Giant Arcs in Galaxy Clusters text January 2003
Galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field: I. Detection, Multiband Photometry, Photometric Redshifts, and Morphology text January 2006
Arcfinder: An algorithm for the automatic detection of gravitational arcs text January 2006
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The Impact of Baryonic Cooling on Giant Arc Abundances text January 2006
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Cited By (9)

The strong gravitational lens finding challenge journal May 2019
Image simulations for gravitational lensing with skylens journal October 2018
Automated Lensing Learner: Automated Strong Lensing Identification with a Computer Vision Technique journal May 2019
The Importance of Secondary Halos for Strong Lensing in Massive Galaxy Clusters across Redshift journal June 2019
The Outer Rim Simulation: A Path to Many-core Supercomputers journal November 2019
CMU DeepLens: deep learning for automatic image-based galaxy–galaxy strong lens finding journal July 2017
The DES Bright Arcs Survey: Hundreds of Candidate Strongly Lensed Galaxy Systems from the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification and Year 1 Observations journal September 2017
Automated Lensing Learner: Automated Strong Lensing Identification with a Computer Vision Technique text January 2017
The importance of secondary halos for strong lensing in massive galaxy clusters across redshift text January 2018

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