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Dark Energy

The Roman View of Strong Gravitational Lenses

Event Type
Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor
Department of Astronomy
Location
134 Astronomy Building
Virtual
wifi event
Date
Feb 4, 2025   3:45 - 4:45 pm  
Speaker
Professor Tansu Daylan
Contact
Daniel Franco
E-Mail
danielf9@illinois.edu
Phone
217-300-6769
Originating Calendar
Astronomy Colloquium Speaker Calendar

Images of galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lenses can constrain dark matter models and the Lambda Cold Dark Matter cosmological paradigm on sub-galactic scales. Currently, there is a dearth of images of these rare systems with high signal-to-noise and angular resolution. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in late 2026, will play a transformative role in strong lensing science with the planned wide-field surveys. With its remarkable 0.281 square degree field of view and diffraction-limited angular resolution of 0.11 arcsec, Roman is uniquely suited to characterizing dark matter substructure from a robust population of strong lenses. We present a yield simulation of detectable strong lenses in Roman's planned High Latitude Wide Area Survey (HLWAS). We simulate a population of galaxy-galaxy strong lenses across cosmic time with Cold Dark Matter subhalo populations, select those detectable in the HLWAS, and generate simulated images accounting for realistic Wide Field Instrument detector effects. We predict around 93,000 detectable strong lenses in the HLWAS, of which about 500 will have sufficient signal-to-noise to be amenable to detailed substructure characterization. We investigate the effect of the variation of the point-spread function across Roman's field of view on detecting the suppression of the subhalo mass function at low masses and individual subhalos. Our simulation products are available to support strong lens science with Roman, such as training neural networks and validating dark matter substructure analysis pipelines.

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