Quasar Mesolensing - Direct Probe to Substructures around Galaxies -

Abstract

Recently, ``CDM crisis'' is under discussion. The main point of this crisis is that number of substructures presented by cosmological N-body simulations based on CDM scenario for structure formation is much larger than observed substructures. Therefore, it is crucial for this crisis to discriminate whether expected number of CDM substructures really exist but non-luminous or do not exist. In this paper, we present a new idea to detect such invisible substructures by utilizing a gravitational lensing. Here, we consider quasars that are gravitationally lensed by a foreground galaxy. A substructure around the lensing galaxy may superposed on one of the lensed images of such quasars. In this situation, additional image splitting should occur in the image behind the substructure, and further multiple images are created. This is ``quasar mesolensing''. We estimate separation and time delay between further multiple images due to quasar mesolensing. The expected value is $1 \sim 30$ milli-arcsecond for the separation and future fine resolution imaging enable us to find invisible substructures, and is $1 \sim 10^3$ second for the time delay and high-speed monitoring of such quasar will be able to find ``echo''-like variation due to quasar mesolensing in intrinsic variability of the quasar. Furthermore, we evaluate that the optical depth for the quasar mesolensing is $\sim 0.1$. Consequently, if we monitor a few multiple quasars, we can find ``echo''-like variation in one of the images after intrinsic flux variations of quasars.