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arXiv · astro-ph/0703312

An integral-field spectroscopic strong lens survey

Abstract

We present the observational results of a survey for strong gravitational lens systems consisting of extended emission-line galaxies lensed by intervening early-type galaxies, conducted using integral field units (IFUs) of the Magellan IMACS and Gemini GMOS-N spectrographs. These data are highly valuable for corroborating the lensing interpretation of Hubble Space Telescope imaging data. We show that in many cases, ground-based IFU spectroscopy is in fact competitive with space-based imaging for the measurement of the mass model parameters of the lensing galaxy. We demonstrate a novel technique of three-dimensional gravitational lens modeling for a single lens system with a resolved lensed rotation curve. We also describe the details of our custom IFU data analysis software, which performs optimal multi-fiber extraction, relative and absolute wavelength calibration to a few hundredths of a pixel RMS, and nearly Poisson-limited sky subtraction.

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Adam S. Bolton, Scott Burles. 2007-03-13. An integral-field spectroscopic strong lens survey. https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630%2F9%2F12%2F443

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