DOI

https://doi.org/10.48717/yh4r-t691

Project

ES096

Title

Confirming the final lens candidates in the mJIVE-20 survey

Abstract

We recently searched for lenses in the wide-field VLBI survey mJIVE-20. Among the initial 3640 sources, we selected fourteen sources that had multiple components and surface brightness consistent with lensing. Two are re-discoveries of known lenses, while the remaining twelve were followed-up with snapshot observations at C-band with the VLBA. From this follow-up we rejected ten sources, leaving two final lens candidates. One of the two candidates has complex extended morphology, which does not allow a robust lens modelling. The other has not been detected at high frequency, which may be due to low sensitivity of the VLBA observations. Here, we request sensitive EVN+e-MERLIN observations at L and C-band to confirm the nature of the two lens candidates by robustly measuring their spectra and surface brightness on different angular scales. Only with the inclusion of e-MERLIN we will be able to recover the extended emission, which may consist of gravitational arcs or Einstein rings. Such systems are powerful astrophysical tool, as they allow precise estimates of mass profiles of high-z lenses, the detection of dark matter substructures, and the observation of faint active galaxies in the early Universe.