AAS 203rd Meeting, January 2004
Session 68 Galaxy Clusters and Large Scale Structure III
Oral, Tuesday, January 6, 2004, 2:00-3:30pm, Centennial III

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[68.02] Spectroscopic Gravitational Lensing and Limits on the Dark Matter Substructure

R. B. Metcalf (UC, Santa Cruz)

Spatially resolved spectroscopic data from the CIRPASS integral field unit (IFU) on Gemini are used to measure the gravitational lensing of the 4-image quasar Q2237+0305 on different size scales. A method for measuring the substructure present in the lens using observations at multiple wavelengths is demonstrated to be very effective and independent of many of the degeneracies inherent in previous methods. The magnification ratios of the QSO's narrow line region (NLR) and broad line region (BLR) are measured and found to disagree with each other and with the published radio and mid-infrared magnification ratios. The disagreement between the BLR ratios and the radio/mid-infrared ratios is interpreted as microlensing by stars in the lens galaxy of the BLR The disagreement between the radio/mid-infrared ratios and the NLR ratios is interpreted as a signature of substructure on a larger scale, possibly the missing small scale structure predicted by the standard cold dark matter (CDM) model. Certain combinations of the radial profile and the substructure surface densities are ruled out using extensive lensing simulations. A substructure mass scale as large as 108 M is strongly disfavored while 104 M is too small if the radio and mid-infrared emission regions have the expected sizes of ~10 pc. The standard elliptical isothermal lens mass profile is not compatible with a substructure surface density of < 280 M/pc2 at the 95% confidence level. This is 4-7% of the galaxy's surface density (depending on which image position is used to evaluate this). The required substructure surface density at the required mass scale is high in comparison with the present expectations within the CDM model.


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: bmetcalf@ucolick.org

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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 35#5
© 2003. The American Astronomical Soceity.