Speaker
Description
Strong lensing time-delays provide an independent method for measuring $H_0$ and probing cosmology. Although multiply imaged transients are very rare, ongoing and upcoming projects in wide-field surveys are expected to discover thousands of such systems, especially in the Vera Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) survey. As a preparation for this unprecedented amount of data, our group has carried out an extensive compilation of thousands of strong lensing candidates in the footprint of current ground-based wide-field surveys with sub-arcsecond resolution. We refer to this comprehensive compilation of gravitational lenses as “the Last Stand Before Rubin” (LaStBeRu). This compilation readily provides a lookup table to identify potential strongly lensed transiens. In addition, we are carrying out an extensive modeling of the best systems in the sample using a custom made pipeline based on the Source Lens and Mass (SLaM) pipelines which makes use of features of the publicly available open-source \texttt{PyAutoLens} software. We have derived modeling results for around 150 strong lensing systems which can be used as a rich reference database for future strongly lensed transients. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the largest uniformly modeled strong lensing samples in current ground-based imaging data. The LaStBeRu sample has been matched with FINK ZTF identified supernovae, yielding dozens transients that might be strongly lensed, some of which could potentially be used to derive time-delay measurements with our modeling pipeline. In this contribution, we will present preliminary results on the modeling of cross-matched systems, including time-delay predictions, for some of them.
