Strong gravitational lensing by AGNs as a probe of the quasar

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The tight correlations found between the mass of supermassive black holes and the luminosities, stellar masses and velocity dispersions of their host galaxies are often interpreted as a sign of their co-evolution. Studying these correlations across redshift provides a powerful insight into the evolutionary path followed by the quasar and its host galaxy. While the mass of the black hole is accessible from single-epoch spectra, measuring the mass of its host galaxy is challenging as the active nucleus largely overshines its host. Here we present a technique to probe quasar–host relations beyond the local Universe with strong gravitational lensing, hence overcoming the use of stellar population models or velocity dispersion measurements, both prone to degeneracies. We study in detail one of the three known cases of strong lensing by a quasar to accurately measure the mass of its host and to infer a total lensing mass within the Einstein radius. The lensing measurement is more precise than any other alternative technique and compatible with the local scaling relation between the mass of the black hole and the stellar mass. The sample of such quasar–galaxy or quasar–quasar lensing systems should reach a few hundred with Euclid and the Rubin-Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, thus enabling the application of such a method with statistically significant sample sizes.

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The HST images supporting this work are publicly available on the Hubble Legacy Archive (https://hla.stsci.edu/). Our reduced Keck and SDSS spectra are available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7806468).

The lens modelling code Lenstronomy and the source reconstruction software SLITronomy are freely accessible at https://github.com/sibirrer/lenstronomyand https://github.com/aymgal/SLITronomy. Stellar masses were estimated by using the public python package GSF (https://github.com/mtakahiro/gsf). The HST PSF was reconstructed using AstroObjectAnalyser, which is publicly available at https://github.com/sibirrer/AstroObjectAnalyser. Spectra have been fitted using pyQSOfit, which is also publicly available at https://github.com/legolason/PyQSOFit.

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M.M. acknowledges the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) under grant P500PT_203114. M.M., F.C. and A.G. are supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (COSMICLENS: grant agreement no. 787886) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) under grant 200020_200463. X.D. is supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant no. JP22K14071.

Institute of Physics, Laboratory of Astrophysics, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Versoix, Switzerland

Martin Millon, Frédéric Courbin & Aymeric Galan

Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and Department of Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Martin Millon

Department of Physics, TUM School of Natural Sciences, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany

Aymeric Galan

STAR Institute, Liège, Belgium

Dominique Sluse

Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Japan

Xuheng Ding

Argelander-Institut für Astronomie, Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany

Malte Tewes

California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

S. G. Djorgovski

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M.M. conducted the analysis. A.G. developed the source reconstruction algorithm SLITronomy. M.M. and F.C wrote the manuscript. X.D. did the stellar population analysis. D.S. measured the black hole mass. All other co-authors actively participated in the discussions, in the HST data acquisition and in the discovery process of SDSS J0919 + 2720.

Correspondence to Martin Millon.

The authors declare no competing interest.

Nature Astronomy thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Millon, M., Courbin, F., Galan, A. et al. Strong gravitational lensing by AGNs as a probe of the quasar–host relations in the distant Universe. Nat Astron (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-01982-2

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Received: 10 March 2022

Accepted: 26 April 2023

Published: 01 June 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-01982-2

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Strong gravitational lensing by AGNs as a probe of the quasar