Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Galaxy And Mass Assembly: A Comparison Between Galaxy-Galaxy Lens Searches In Kids/Gama, Shawn Knabel, Benne Holwerda

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Strong gravitational lenses are cases where a distant background galaxy is located directly behind a massive foreground galaxy, whose gravity causes the light from the background galaxy to bend around the foreground galaxy. In addition to being visually stunning, these rare events are useful laboratories for furthering our understanding of gravity and cosmology and to determine properties, such as the mass and dark matter content, of the lensing galaxies themselves. The trouble is finding enough of these strong gravitational lenses for further study. The immensity of the catalogs being collected by state-of-the-art telescopes requires equally innovative methods for interpreting that …