lenscat 0.1.5

A public and community-maintained catalog of known strong gravitational lenses

$\texttt{lenscat}$

A public and community-contributed catalog of known strong gravitational lenses.

Quickstart

The catalog is available as a plain csv file under lenscat/data/catalog.csv. Alternatively, one can interact with the catalog using a web app (mobile-friendly).

We also provide a python package lenscat, available in pypi. Simply do

pip install lenscat

to install the latest version. Here we adopt the continuous deployment paradigm (similar to astroquery). Whenever there is a change in the catalog content, or a major change in the code, a new release will be available instantaneously on both GitHub and PyPI.

The code converts the catalog in the csv file into a custom Catalog object that is inherited from the Table object in astropy. To access the catalog, simply run

import lenscat; lenscat.catalog

and this will show a formatted table to the output. For example,

<Catalog length=4587>
     name         RA       DEC     zlens     type   grading
                 deg       deg
    str20      float64   float64   str15     str7     str9
------------- ---------- -------- -------- ------- ---------
   J0011-0845    2.83435  -8.7643        -  galaxy confirmed
   J0013+5119   3.348077  51.3183        -  galaxy confirmed
 PSJ0028+0631    7.09369   6.5317        -  galaxy confirmed
 PSJ0030-1525     7.5636 -15.4177 measured  galaxy confirmed
   J0047+2514 11.9465943  25.2411        -  galaxy confirmed
  HE0047-1756    12.6158 -17.6693    0.407  galaxy confirmed
          ...        ...      ...      ...     ...       ...
235614+023115  359.05923  2.52107    0.372  galaxy  probable
235730+010133 359.377643  1.02596    0.638  galaxy  probable
235811+003309   359.5475   0.5527    0.639 cluster  probable
235853+012406 359.721708 1.401816    0.481  galaxy  probable
235933+020823   359.8897   2.1398     0.43 cluster confirmed
235948-005913  359.95245 -0.98702    0.758  galaxy  probable
235952+004154   359.9698   0.6985    0.267 cluster  probable

Note that the code will try to assign the unit for each of the columns inferred from its name, and that it will hide the 'ref' column by default. One can show or hide the 'ref' column by calling .show_ref() and .hide_ref() on the Catalog object respectively.

Every Catalog object supports three features: basic searching with .search(), crossmatching with a skymap with .crossmatch(), and visualizing with .plot(). Note that these function will return a Catalog object, and hence they can be composed together (e.g., .crossmatch().search()).

Basic searching

This feature is implemented as .search(). One can search/filter by any combination of

• ranges of right ascension (specified as RA_range=(RA_min, RA_max))
• ranges of declination (specified as DEC_range=(DEC_min, DEC_max))
• ranges of lens redshift if available (specified as zlens_range=(zlens_min, zlens_max))
• type of the lenses (specified as lens_type)
• grading of the lenses (specified as grading)

For example, to get a list of the cluster-scale lenses which are confirmed and with a redshift $z_{\mathrm{lens}} \geq 1$ together with the reference, run

import lenscat, numpy
lenscat.catalog.search(grading="confirmed", lens_type="cluster", zlens_range=(1,numpy.inf)).show_ref()

The output would be something like

<Catalog length=3>
     name         RA       DEC    zlens   type   grading                                        ref
                 deg       deg
    str20      float64   float64  str15   str7     str9                                        str171
------------- --------- --------- ----- ------- --------- ------------------------------------------------------------------
021118-042729 32.827087 -4.458069  1.02 cluster confirmed https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00634 More et al. 2012 More et al. 2016
023100-062139   37.7516   -6.3608  1.17 cluster confirmed                                   https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.01611
220859+020655  332.2495    2.1153  1.04 cluster confirmed                                   https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.01611

Crossmatching with a skymap

This feature is implemented as .crossmatch(). This function is simply a wrapper to the crossmatch() function in ligo.skymap which performs the cross-matching of a gravitational-wave (GW) skymap with a given list of coordinates. For example, to cross-match the GW skymap of GW170814 (download from here) with only the confirmed lenses in the lenscat catalog, simply run

import lenscat
lenscat.catalog.search(lens_type="galaxy").crossmatch("GW170814_skymap.fits.gz")

Running this will give

<Catalog length=3818>
     name          RA        DEC    zlens   type   grading  searched probability   searched area   
                  deg        deg                                                        deg2       
    str20       float64    float64  str15   str7     str9         float64             float64      
-------------- ---------- --------- ------ ------ --------- -------------------- ------------------
 DESJ0303-4626    45.9507 -46.44066   1.37 galaxy  probable  0.11857081625736535   2.59328622407046
 DESJ0311-4232   47.86322 -42.53863   0.37 galaxy  probable   0.2301796464718608  5.619333233953008
 DESJ0310-4647   47.63526 -46.78398   0.71 galaxy  probable  0.36778302134840013 10.261676209026643
 DESJ0301-4426    45.4638 -44.44055   0.76 galaxy  probable   0.4683381098641989 14.661410864782189
 DESJ0304-4921   46.06729 -49.35725   0.34 galaxy confirmed   0.6465740359340766 26.791826830724982
 DESJ0300-5001   45.09019 -50.02469   0.53 galaxy confirmed   0.7082286031333002 33.860252998986475

The cross-matching can be done to the sky localization from any type of transients as long as it is in the FITS format. For example, to cross-match the localization of GRB 240229A (download from here), simply run

import lenscat
lenscat.catalog.crossmatch("glg_healpix_all_bn240229588.fit")

In this case, the output would be

<Catalog length=4587>
       name             RA          DEC     zlens    type   grading  searched probability   searched area   
                       deg          deg                                                          deg2       
      str20          float64      float64   str15    str7     str9         float64             float64      
------------------ ------------ ----------- ------ ------- --------- -------------------- ------------------
   SDSSJ1320+1644*    200.24778    16.73437  0.899  galaxy confirmed   0.1614180609749184 6.9241725729921235
    SDSSJ1330+1750    202.63079    17.84456 0.2074  galaxy confirmed   0.6132034472687292  44.48256319619201
    SDSSJ1304+2001    196.18166    20.01805   0.4?  galaxy confirmed   0.6545106150094973  51.40673576918417
    SDSSJ1330+1810    202.57772    18.17581  0.373  galaxy confirmed   0.6730233044611307  54.97373376133156
    SDSSJ1258+1657    194.58017    16.95489   0.4?  galaxy confirmed   0.6890963497394108  58.33090834217615

To generate a visualization of a crossmatching result, simply invoke .plot() to a crossmatching result. For example,

import lenscat
lenscat.catalog.crossmatch("GW170814_skymap.fits.gz").plot(searched_prob_threshold=0.7)

will generate a figure like this

Format

Column name	Description
name	Names of galaxies/galaxy clusters
RA [deg]	Right ascension in dergees
DEC [deg]	Declination in degress
zlens	Lens redshift (if known)
type	Type of lens (i.e. galaxy or galaxy cluster)
grading	Grading whether it is a confirmed lens or a probable lens (see individual references for internal grading systems)
ref	Reference to the corresponding catalog or study

References

This catalog contains the known strong lenses from the following studies:

• GLQ Database

• CLASH (Postman+2012)

• MUSES Cluster Followups (Richards+2020)

• RELICS

• 37 Clusters from SDSS Giant Arcs Survey

• An Extended Catalog of Galaxy–Galaxy Strong Gravitational Lenses Discovered in DES Using Convolutional Neural Networks

• The AGEL Survey: Spectroscopic Confirmation of Strong Gravitational Lenses in the DES and DECaLS Fields Selected Using Convolutional Neural Networks

• LSD Survey

• (COSMOS) LensFlow: A Convolutional Neural Network in Search of Strong Gravitational Lenses

• SLACS. XIII. Galaxy-scale strong lens candidates

• RINGFINDER: Automated Detection of Galaxy-scale Gravitational Lenses in Ground-based Multi-filter Imaging Data

• Survey of Gravitationally-lensed Objects in HSC Imaging (SuGOHI) Candidate List

See also

Master Lens Database

Acknowledgements

This project was supported by the research grant no. VIL37766 and no. VIL53101 from Villum Fonden, and the DNRF Chair program grant no. DNRF162 by the Danish National Research Foundation.

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101131233.

We would also like to thank Jonah Kanner for introducing us the amazing streamlit service that hosts the web app for lenscat.