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E. L. Turner (Princeton Univ. Obsv.), M. Oguri, Y. Suto (Dept. of Physics & RESCEU, Univ. of Tokyo)
Strong gravitational lensing of distant supernovae (SNe), particularly Type Ia's, has some exploitable properties not available when other sorts of cosmologically distant sources are lensed. One such property is that the ``standard candle'' nature of SN at peak brightness allows a direct determination of the lensing magnification factor for each well observed image. Another is that the duration of a SN event is of the same order as the differential time delays between the various lens images for roughly galaxy mass lensing objects.
As an initial exploration of these possibilities we present calculations of SN lensing statistics in a ``concordance cosmology'' assuming a simple spherical model for lens mass distributions. We emphasize magnification and time delay effects. Plausible SN surveys, such as the proposed SNAP space mission, would discover several to some tens of strongly lensed SNe Ia per year, and at least a few of these will be at redshifts well beyond those that would be accessible via unlensed events. The total number of such anomalously high redshift SNe Ia will be a useful test of high redshift star formation models. SN surveys of finite duration will, of course, miss the appearance of some images, and the effect becomes large when the delay approaches the survey duration; we quantify this selection bias. Finally, we investigate how well the appearance of trailing images can be predicted based on various amounts of available information on the lensing event.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: elt@astro.princeton.edu
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34, #4
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.