A one-stop shop for all your gravitational lens finding robot's training needs
The idea is to host a simple website where people interested in lens-finding in optical image surveys can come and find "standard sets" of training data. Links will take you to the relevant project websites, that we are happy to adveryize - and over time, we'll add our own simulated LSST data.
####Sample Image
####Overview, taken from the site Gravitationally lensed quasars have proved to be a powerful tool to explore the Universe. It serves as an ideal probe of dark matter in galaxies and clusters, since lensing gives a robust measurement of the projected mass inside the Einstein radius. Moreover, the cosmological nature of lensed quasars as well as well-understood underlying physics makes lensed quasars a unique probe of cosmological parameters. For instance, the probability of strong lensing is sensitive to various cosmological parameters such as the abundance of dark energy. Time delays between multiple images of lensed quasar systems offer a direct probe of the global Hubble constant.
The first gravitationally lensed quasar Q0957+561 was discovered in 1979. Since then, roughly 80 lensed quasars have been discovered with various methods applied to optical or radio data. However, applications of these lensed quasar systems have often been limited by the small number of lenses, in particular those identified by homogeneous criteria: This is why large systematic surveys of lensed quasars have been anticipated.
The SDSS Quasar Lens Search (SQLS) is aimed to discover many (~100) lensed quasars from the large homogeneous data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The SDSS is an ambitious optical survey to map 1/4 of the entire sky with five broad band imaging. The SDSS also conducts extensive spectroscopic surveys of galaxies and quasars to make a three-dimensional map of the Universe. When completed, the SDSS will yield a spectroscopic sample of 100,000 quasars. Our plan of the SQLS is to take advantage of this huge spectroscopic quasar sample to locate many lensed quasars. We search for lensed quasars using well-studied selection algorithms, which allows accurate estimates of lensing rates and lensing biases. In addition, the aim of the SQLS includes the detection of rare quasar lens events such as multiple quasars lensed by a massive cluster of galaxies.
##SpaceWarps
Coming Soon!
- Robert Brunner
- Phil Marshall
- the LSST strong lensing community
- your name here!