Gravitational lenses and. cosmological evolution

The effect of gravitational lensing on the apparent evolution of extragalactic radio sources is investigated. Models for a lens population consisting of galaxies and clusters of galaxies are constructed used to calculate the distribution of amplification factors caused by lensing ,. Although many objects at high redshifts are predicted to have flux densities altered by 10-20 per cent relative to a homogeneous universe, flux conservation implies that de-amplification is as common as amplification. The effect on cosmological evolution as inferred from source counts and redshift data are thus relatively small; the slope of the counts is not large enough for intrinsically rare lensing events of high amplitude to corrupt observed sample Lensing effects may be of greater importance for optically selected quasar where lenses of mass as low as ∼10^-4 M_sun can cause large amplifications.