AstroFIt 2 – COFUND fellow since May 1, 2017
Project ended April 30, 2020
INAF Research Centre: Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte
Email: chiara.spiniello at inaf.it
Talks:
- VST in the era of the large sky surveys _ KiDSLens: Gotta catch’em all
- Gotta catch’Em All: Strong gravitational lenses in KiDS and KABS
- The stellar mass function is not universal
Papers/Publications:
- MUSE observations of M87: radial gradients for the stellar initial-mass function and the abundance of Sodium (MNRAS, 27/11/2017)
- The Fornax Cluster VLT Spectroscopic Survey. I – VIMOS spectroscopy of compact stellar systems in the Fornax core region (MNRAS, 12/3/2018)
- Quasar Lenses in the South: searches over the DES public footprint (MNRAS, 30/5/2018)
- KiDS-SQuaD: The KiDS Strongly lensed Quasar Detection project (MNRAS, 12/7/2018)
- The Fornax Cluster VLT Spectroscopic Survey II – Planetary Nebulae kinematics within 200 kpc of the cluster core (MNRAS, 28/8/2018)
- The first sample of spectroscopically confirmed ultra-compact massive galaxies in the Kilo Degree Survey (MNRAS, 20/9/2018)
- KiDS0239-3211: A New Gravitational Quadruple Lens Candidate (RNAAS, 4/10/2018)
- Bright lenses are easy to find: Spectroscopic confirmation of lensed quasars in the Southern Sky (MNRAS, 10/12/2018)
- LinKS: discovering galaxy-scale strong lenses in the Kilo-Degree Survey using convolutional neural networks (MNRAS, 17/1/2019)
- Spectroscopic confirmation and modelling of two lensed quadruple quasars in the Dark Energy Survey public footprint (MNRAS, 17/1/2019)
- Catalog of quasars from the Kilo-Degree Survey Data Release 3 (Astronomy & Astrophysics, 10/4/2019)
- VEXAS: VISTA EXtension to Auxiliary Surveys Data Release 1. The southern Galactic hemisphere (Astronomy & Astrophysics, 29/8/2019)
- New high-quality strong lens candidates with deep learning in the Kilo Degree Survey (ApJ, 9/4/2020)
- KiDS-SQuaD – II. Machine learning selection of bright extragalactic objects to search for new gravitationally lensed quasars (Astronomy & Astrophysics, 8/10/2019)
- Building the Largest Spectroscopic Sample of Ultracompact Massive Galaxies with the Kilo Degree Survey (The Astrophysical Journal, 10/4/2020)
- STRIDES: a 3.9 per cent measurement of the Hubble constant from the strong lens system DES J0408−5354 (MNRAS, 16/4/2020)
Project title: DaLKiDS – Dark vs. Light in KiDS galaxies with Strong Lensing
Abstract:
The internal distribution of dark and luminous mass in Early-Type Galaxies (ETGs) is a deep and puzzling open issue in modern astrophysics but is also an essential requirement to fully comprehend the processes in hierarchical galaxy formation. Enormous effort has been devoted to study the relationship between baryons, that dominates astrophysical observables, and dark matter, that dominates most of the dynamics during galaxy formation. Despite that, the relative contribution of the two components and the knowledge of the processes that have driven their assembly in galaxies is still highly incomplete.
Mass measurements, that serve to establish the link between the observed galaxies and their dark haloes, can be obtained from internal kinematics of galaxies, from X-ray observations of hot gaseous haloes around galaxies, and from strong gravitational lensing. While the first two determinations require assumptions of steady-state dynamical equilibrium, gravitational lensing directly probes the projected mass distribution and is only gravity-dependent. This technique is therefore very powerful, but comes at a price: lensing measurements are rare and depend on suitable image configurations and mass distributions.
This project primarily aims at searching for new gravitational lenses in the ESO Kilo Degree Survey, with the goal of create the largest ground based catalog of strong lens ETGs, more extended in mass and redshift than current literature. A spectroscopically follow-up of the best lens candidates with state-of-the-art telescopes facilities is also planned to study luminous and dark matter distributions, internal structure stellar population and Initial Mass Function slope.