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Preliminary Exam
Simulating Radio Strong Gravitational Lenses for the Dark Matter Substructure Inference Problem
Date: Tuesday, August 25th
Time: 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Place: Chamberlin 5310
Speaker: Joyce Lin
Abstract: During the next decade, new astronomical facilities including the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, Euclid Space Telescope, Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and Square Kilometer Array Observatory will conduct wide-area surveys that substantially enlarge samples of rare astronomical phenomena, including strong gravitational lenses that can be used to investigate the fundamental nature of dark matter. Within the future sample of hundreds of thousands of strong lenses, a subset of those systems with highly magnified arcs will be particularly well suited for “gravitational imaging” analyses that use astrometric anomalies to probe the abundance and density profiles of low-mass dark matter halos within the main deflector and along the line of sight. Very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) observations with milliarcsecond-scale angular resolution of radio-bright lensed arcs are sensitive to dark matter halos with masses down to ~10^6 solar masses, likely below the threshold to host a visible stellar population, and thus provide a stringent test of the collision-less cold dark matter paradigm. However, due to the challenge of identifying suitable radio-bright strong lenses, only two such systems have been studied in detail to date. We present a forecast for the sample of strong lens systems that could be accessible for gravitational imaging analyses using current and future VLBI networks, including the Next Generation Very Large Array (ngVLA).
Host: Keith Bechtol
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