Speaker
Description
The Euclid mission is expected to discover approximately 150,000 strong gravitational lenses, greatly expanding the known lens population (Collett et al. 2015). Low-redshift early-type galaxies (ETGs) offer a unique opportunity to probe the stellar initial mass function (IMF) as their Einstein radii, typically smaller than the effective radius, enable mass measurements more sensitive to baryonic matter since at these scales it dominates dark matter by far.
Prior studies of massive ETGs found Milky Way-like IMFs (Smith & Lucey 2013; Smith et al. 2015), conflicting with stellar population models that suggest heavier IMFs (Conroy 2014). Dynamical modeling with MUSE and SINFONI data also reveals substantial mass-to-light ratio gradients (Mehrgan et al. 2024; Neureiter et al. 2023), highlighting the potential of combining dynamical and lensing techniques for IMF constraints (Thomas et al. 2011; Newman et al. 2017).
The project focuses on low-redshift strong lens ETGs to facilitate combined analyses. VIS imaging will enable initial lensing mass models, providing a basis for follow-up with LBT-LUCY and VLT-MUSE, where we will examine velocity dispersion fields and stellar population metrics, advancing our understanding of the IMF and mass distribution in massive galaxies.
| Abstract title | Low redshift strong lensing in Euclid |
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