Illuminating Dark Energy and Black Holes with Strong Gravitational Lensing in the Nancy Grace Roman Space Observatory Era
Program ID 19065
Science Category Galaxies
Program Type Analysis
Category Medium
Principal Investigator Rodrigo Cordova Rosado
PI Institution Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Co-Investigators
  • Kim-Vy Tran (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
  • Karl Glazebrook (Swinburne University of Technology)
  • Tucker Jones (University of California, Davis)
  • Tansu Daylan (Washington University in St. Louis)
  • Ryan Hickox (Dartmouth College)
  • Glenn Kacprzak (Swinburne University of Technology)
  • Tania Baron (Swinburne University of Technology)
  • Keerthi Vasan G. C. (Carnegie Observatories)
  • Daniel Ballard (University of Sydney)
  • Rong Xu (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
  • Sam Ecclestone-Browne (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
  • Giovanni Ferrami (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics)
Abstract We use strong gravitational lenses as formidable probes to measure deflector mass profiles and constrain cosmological parameter spaces unexplored by the CMB and galaxy clustering. Our Roman proposal combines high-resolution space-based imaging and deep ground-based spectroscopy to find and leverage powerful gravitational laboratories in the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey. From the first two years of observations, we will identify two rare classes of strong gravitational lenses and follow-up ∼ 100 with IFU spectroscopy to: (i) deliver a benchmark (≲ 10% precision) measurement of the dark energy equation of state parameter 𝑤 and (ii) cement a groundbreaking probe for Super-Massive Black Hole (SMBH) – host galaxy co-evolution from 0.3 ≲ 𝑧 ≲ 1.