AutoLens: automated modeling of a strong lens’s light, mass and source

Nightingale, J.W., Dye, S. and Massey, Richard J. (2018) AutoLens: automated modeling of a strong lens’s light, mass and source. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . ISSN 0035-8711

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Abstract

This work presents AutoLens, the first entirely automated modeling suite for the analysis of galaxy-scale strong gravitational lenses. AutoLens simultaneously models the lens galaxy’s light and mass whilst reconstructing the extended source galaxy on an adaptive pixel-grid. The method’s approach to source-plane discretization is amorphous, adapting its clustering and regularization to the intrinsic properties of the lensed source. The lens’s light is fitted using a superposition of Sersic functions, allowing AutoLens to cleanly deblend its light from the source. Single component mass models representing the lens’s total mass density profile are demonstrated, which in conjunction with light modeling can detect central images using a centrally cored profile. Decomposed mass modeling is also shown, which can fully decouple a lens’s light and dark matter and determine whether the two component are geometrically aligned. The complexity of the light and mass models are automatically chosen via Bayesian model comparison. These steps form AutoLens’s automated analysis pipeline, such that all results in this work are generated without any user-intervention. This is rigorously tested on a large suite of simulated images, assessing its performance on a broad range of lens profiles, source morphologies and lensing geometries. The method’s performance is excellent, with accurate light, mass and source profiles inferred for data sets representative of both existing Hubble imaging and future Euclid wide-field observations.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: This article has been accepted for publication inMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Keywords: gravitational lensing, galaxies: structure
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham, UK > Faculty of Science > School of Physics and Astronomy
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty1264
Depositing User: Eprints, Support
Date Deposited: 13 Jun 2018 14:32
Last Modified: 14 Jun 2018 16:31
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/52389

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