Gravitationally Lensed Galaxies in H-ATLAS

Submitted by evaliante on Wed, 11/15/2017 - 13:42
The H-ATLAS team released a catalogue of 80 candidate lensed galaxies. These sources offer the opportunity of studying the morphology and dynamic of z ∼ 2 galaxies with unprecedented details.

The H-ATLAS team has recently published a catalogue of 80 candidate gravitationally lensed galaxies extracted from the full survey. This is the link to the publication, led by Dr. Mattia Negrello:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017MNRAS.465.3558N


The candidate lensed galaxies were identified using a simple method, which consists in selecting all the sub-mm sources in the survey with a 500μm flux density higher than 100mJy and then removing contaminants, such as radio-bright blazars and local (z<0.1) late-type galaxies. Dr. Negrello and his collaborators already puy this method to test in 2010, using the first 16 square degree of the extragalactic sky observed as part of the H-ATLAS (see http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010Sci...330..800N).


Extensive campaigns of follow-up observations are currently on-going to confirm the lensing scenario: so far 20 out of 80 sources have been confirmed to be lensed, while 1 was found to be a dusty proto-cluster (see http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013ApJ...772..137I).


Thanks to the boosting in luminosity and the extra gain in spatial resolution provided by gravitational lensing, the H-ATLAS catalogue of lensed galaxies offers the unique opportunity of studying with  unprecedented details the morphological and dynamical properties of dusty star forming galaxies at z ∼ 2, as recently demonstrated by the analysis of the ALMA observations of SDP.81, the first lensed galaxy discovered by H-ATLAS, which is shown in the image (see e.g. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015MNRAS.452.2258D).