A Search for Strong Gravitational Lenses in Early-type Galaxies Using UKIDSS

Abstract

This work is focused on a search for strong gravitational lenses in early-type galaxies (ETGs). The total number of samples is 4,706 galaxies encompassing a magnitude range 15.0 < i < 18.0 and colour 3.5 < (u-r) < 5.0. Two databases were employed as the source of K-band images (UKIDSS Large Area Survey) and g, r, i images (SDSS). All samples were fitted to a Sersic component and automatically processed using GALFIT (Peng et al. 2002; Peng et al. 2010) inside a Python script (Appendix A). The first classification generated 259 galaxies which are seen as single galaxies in their K-band images. These galaxies were then reclassified based on image contouring in g, r, i, and K filters and therefore resulted in three categories of samples: Sample A (99 galaxies), Sample B (96 galaxies), and Sample C (64 galaxies).

Date of Award	31 Dec 2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Neal Jackson (Supervisor)