The Hubble Constant from Gravitational Lens Time Delays

The potential of gravitational lenses for providing direct, physical measurements of the Hubble constant, free from systematic errors associated with the traditional distance ladder, has long been recognized. However, it is only recently that there has been a convincing measurement of a time delay sufficiently accurate to carry out this program. By itself, an accurate time delay measurement does not produce an equivalently definite Hubble constant and the errors associated wi...

We present a refined gravitational lens model of the four-image lens system B1608+656 based on new and improved observational constraints: (i) the three independent time-delays and flux-ratios from VLA observations, (ii) the radio-image positions from VLBA observations, (iii) the shape of the deconvolved Einstein Ring from optical and infrared HST images, (iv) the extinction-corrected lens-galaxy centroids and structural parameters, and (v) a stellar velocity dispersion, sigm...

Measured time delays between the images of a gravitationally lensed source can lead to a determination of the Hubble constant ($H_o$), but only if the lensing mass distribution is well understood. The inability to sufficiently constrain galaxy mass models results in large uncertainties on the derived $H_o$, and severely hampers the cosmological application of this otherwise elegant method. At the same time, lensing must compete with new techniques that have the potential to m...

One of the main objectives of the Cosmic Lens All-Sky Survey (CLASS) collaboration has been to find gravitational lens (GL) systems at radio wavelengths that are suitable for the determination of time delays between image pairs. The survey is now near completion and at least 18 GL systems have been found. Here, I will discuss our efforts to measure time delays from several of these systems with the ultimate aim of constraining the Hubble Constant (H0). Thus far three CLASS GL...

We present the results of a program to monitor the four-image gravitational lens B1608+656 with the VLA. The system was observed over a seven month period from 1996 October to 1997 May. The 64 epochs of observation have an average spacing of 3.6~d. The light curves of the four images of the background source show that the flux density of the background source has varied at the ~5% level. We measure time delays in the system based on common features that are seen in all four l...

EDITED FROM PAPER: We present mass models of the four-image gravitational lens system B1608+656. A mass model for the lens galaxies has been determined that reproduces the image positions, two out of three flux-density ratios and the model time delays. Using the time delays determined by Fassnacht et al. (1999a), we find that the best isothermal mass model gives H_0=59^{+7}_{-6} km/s/Mpc for Omega_m=1 and Omega_l=0.0, or H_0=(65-63)^{+7}_{-6} km/s/Mpc for Omega_m=0.3 and Om...

We present a simultaneous analysis of 10 galaxy lenses having time-delay measurements. For each lens we derive a detailed free-form mass map, with uncertainties, and with the additional requirement of a shared value of the Hubble parameter across all the lenses. We test the prior involved in the lens reconstruction against a galaxy-formation simulation. Assuming a concordance cosmology, we obtain 1/H_0 = 13.5 (+2.5/-1.3) Gyr

Time delays between lensed multiple images have been known to provide an interesting probe of the Hubble constant, but such application is often limited by degeneracies with the shape of lens potentials. We propose a new statistical approach to examine the dependence of time delays on the complexity of lens potentials, such as higher-order perturbations, non-isothermality, and substructures. Specifically, we introduce a reduced time delay and explore its behavior as a functio...

Gravitational lensing is now widely and successfully used to study a range of astronomical phenomena, from individual objects, like galaxies and clusters, to the mass distribution on various scales, to the overall geometry of the Universe. Here we describe and assess the use of gravitational lensing as ``gold standards'' in addressing one of the fundamental problems in astronomy, the determination of the absolute distance scale to extragalactic objects. This is commonly param...

We study gravitational lens time delays for a general family of lensing potentials, which includes the popular singular isothermal elliptical potential and singular isothermal elliptical density distribution but allows general angular structure. Using a novel approach, we show that the time delay can be cast in a very simple form, depending only on the observed image positions. Including an external shear changes the time delay proportional to the shear strength, and varying ...