Measuring Weak Lensing of a Multiply Imaged Quasar
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2005
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Physics & Astronomy
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Abstract
A gravitational lens bends the light from a source, distorting the morphology. Further, if the
lens is sufficiently strong, this distortion can produce multiple images of the original source. With
multiple images that have a known time delay, one can calculate Hubble's constant. However,
there is some difficulty in doing so because one needs to accurately describe the mass distribution
of the lens system. One such source is 0957+561 , a gravitationally lensed quasar with two resolvable
images, one of which has an extended, polarized jet. Unlike the morphology, the intrinsic
polarization of the jet is unchanged by gravitational lensing. We therefore predicted the deviation
of the polarization from the observed morphology of the jet due to weak lensing. By simulating
King, de Vaucouleurs, softened isothermal sphere (SIS), and Navarro, Frenk, and White (NFW)
mass profiles for the lensing galaxy, we quantified the sensitivity of the observed lensing signal to
these different models. We then combined this with the amount of mass that must be interior to
the two images, which we calculated to be 8.3 * 1012 M0 using strong lensing. We found that the
King and SIS profiles were consistent with the data, while the cuspy profiles, de Vaucouleurs and
NFW, were inconsistent with the data. This technique of using both strong and weak lensing can
be applied to any source with multiple images and a jet with adequate polarization.