The Statistics of Gravitational Lensing. III. Astrophysical Consequences of Quasar Lensing
Abstract
The method of Schmidt and Green (1983) for calculating the luminosity function of quasars is combined with gravitational-lensing theory to compute expected properties of lensed systems. Multiple quasar images produced by galaxies are of order 0.001 of the observed quasars, with the numbers over the whole sky calculated to be (0.86, 120, 1600) to limiting B magnitudes of (16, 19, 22). The amount of 'false evolution' is small except for an interesting subset of apparently bright, large-redshift objects for which minilensing by starlike objects may be important. Some of the BL Lac objects may be in this category, with the galaxy identified as the parent object really a foreground object within which stars have lensed a background optically violent variable quasar.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal
- Pub Date:
- January 1986
- DOI:
- 10.1086/163783
- Bibcode:
- 1986ApJ...300...68O
- Keywords:
-
- Computational Astrophysics;
- Gravitational Lenses;
- Luminosity;
- Quasars;
- Statistical Distributions;
- Functions (Mathematics);
- Red Shift;
- Astrophysics;
- GRAVITATION;
- QUASARS