We present a comprehensive analysis of the mass and light distributions in cluster-scale strong gravitational lens systems. Strong gravitational lensing is a rare phenomenon in the universe in which massive foreground galaxies magnify and multiply-image background source galaxies into magnificent arcs. The COOL-LAMPS collaboration (Chicago Optically-Selected Lenses Located at the Margins of Public Surveys) has discovered and confirmed hundreds lensing systems via color-magnitude selection and visual inspection with lens redshifts ranging from ∼ 0.2 to ∼ 1.2 in DECaLS (Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey) Data Release 8 images, of which 179 are analyzed here. In this work, we compute parametric estimates of the Einstein-radius-enclosed mass and luminosity for each system using only two measured parameters: the Einstein radius and the photometric galaxy-cluster redshift. We find that the total-mass-to-light ratio has little correlation with the redshift of the cluster, and we also parameterize the stellar-to-total-mass ratio as a function of physical distance in kiloparsecs from the center of the BCG. This work will lay out a blueprint for studying larger samples of cluster-scale strong gravitational lens candidates in upcoming imaging surveys such as Rubin/LSST (Legacy Survey of Space and Time), in which an algorithmic treatment of lensing systems will be needed due to the sheer volume of data these surveys will produce.
Simon D. Mork (Thu,) studied this question.