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  • TDCOSMO: XVII. New time delays in 22 lensed quasars from optical monitoring with the ESO-VST 2.6m and MPG 2.2m telescopes

This content will become publicly available on May 1, 2026

Title: TDCOSMO: XVII. New time delays in 22 lensed quasars from optical monitoring with the ESO-VST 2.6m and MPG 2.2m telescopes
We present new time delays, the main ingredient of time delay cosmography, for 22 lensed quasars resulting from high-cadencer-band monitoring on the 2.6 m ESO VLT Survey Telescope and Max-Planck-Gesellschaft 2.2 m telescope. Each lensed quasar was typically monitored for one to four seasons, often shared between the two telescopes to mitigate the interruptions forced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample of targets consists of 19 quadruply and 3 doubly imaged quasars, which received a total of 1918 hours of on-sky time split into 21 581 wide-field frames, each 320 seconds long. In a given field, the 5-σdepth of the combined exposures typically reaches the 27thmagnitude, while that of single visits is 24.5 mag – similar to the expected depth of the upcoming Vera-Rubin LSST. The fluxes of the different lensed images of the targets were reliably de-blended, providing not only light curves with photometric precision down to the photon noise limit, but also high-resolution models of the targets whose features and astrometry were systematically confirmed inHubbleSpace Telescope imaging. This was made possible thanks to a new photometric pipeline,lightcurver, and the forward modelling methodSTARRED. Finally, the time delays between pairs of curves and their uncertainties were estimated, taking into account the degeneracy due to microlensing, and for the first time the full covariance matrices of the delay pairs are provided. Of note, this survey, with 13 square degrees, has applications beyond that of time delays, such as the study of the structure function of the multiple high-redshift quasars present in the footprint at a new high in terms of both depth and frequency. The reduced images will be available through the European Southern Observatory Science Portal.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2407277 2407278
PAR ID:
10625151
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more » ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; « less
Publisher / Repository:
A&A
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Volume:
697
ISSN:
0004-6361
Page Range / eLocation ID:
A139
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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