Cosmology with the Carousel Lens

One of our most exciting discoveries is the Carousel Lens (Figure 10, Huang et al., 2021, and it was featured in a NOIRLab press release; see also O'Donnell et al., 2022), a remarkable strong gravitational lens system with a large number of multiply-imaged background sources across many different redshifts.

We carried out spectroscopic confirmation with VLT/MUSE and constructed a successful lens model (Sheu et al., 2024b; we identified 7 background sources at the time of this paper but we have since found even more.). We showed that the main deflector of this cluster scale lens is well-modeled by an elliptical power-law mass profile.

With its uniquely rich set of multiple sources and a relaxed mass profile, the Carousel Lens provides an unprecedented laboratory for precision cosmology. In upcoming work, we will use this system to place constraints on cosmological parameters.