Astro2020 Science White Paper: A New Era for X-ray Lensing Studies of Quasars and Galaxies
Abstract
Current X-ray observations and simulations show that gravitational lensing can be used to infer the structure near the event horizons of black holes, constrain the dynamics and evolution of black-hole accretion and outflows, test general relativity in the strong-gravity regime and place constraints on the evolution of dark matter in the lensing galaxies. These science goals currently cannot be achieved in a statistically large sample of z = 0.5 - 5 lensed quasars due to the limited capabilities of current X-ray telescopes and the relatively low number (~200) of known lensed quasars. The latter limitation will be resolved with the multi-band and wide-field photometric optical survey of LSST that is expected to lead to the discovery of > 4,000 additional gravitationally lensed systems. As we show in this white paper, these science goals can be reached with an X-ray telescope having a spatial resolution of <0.5arcsec to resolve the lensed images and a collecting area of >0.5 m^2 at 1 keV.
- Publication:
-
arXiv e-prints
- Pub Date:
- April 2019
- DOI:
- 10.48550/arXiv.1904.02018
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1904.02018
- Bibcode:
- 2019arXiv190402018C
- Keywords:
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- Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena;
- Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies
- E-Print:
- Submitted to the Astro2020 Decadal Survey call for science white papers on Astronomy and Astrophysics, 7 pages, includes 3 figures