2011/12/12 by Irène Balmès, Balmès, Irène, Pier-Stefano Corasaniti +1
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Gaussian Processes and Bayesian Inference #astro-ph.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1112.2501
4 pages, proceeding for the SF2A conference
arxiv created 2011/12/12 · openalex publication_date 2011/12/12 · arxiv updated 2011/12/13 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Over the past decade advancements in the understanding of several astrophysical phenomena have allowed us to infer a concordance cosmological model that successfully accounts for most of the observations of our universe. This has opened up the way to studies that aim to better determine the constants of the model and confront its predictions with those of competing scenarios. Here, we use strong gravitational lenses as cosmological probes. Strong lensing, as opposed to weak lensing, produces multiple images of a single source. Extracting cosmologically relevant information requires accurate modeling of the lens mass distribution, the latter being a galaxy or a cluster. To this purpose a variety of models are available, but it is hard to distinguish between them, as the choice is mostly guided by the quality of the fit to the data without accounting for the number of additional parameters introduced. However, this is a model selection problem rather than one of parameter fitting that we address in the Bayesian framework. Using simple test cases, we show that the assumption of more complicate lens models may not be justified given the level of accuracy of the data.