The Story of Strongly Lensed Jets and Cosmology

Mon, November 16, 2015

The most straightforward method of estimating the Hubble constant relies on time delays between mirage images of strongly lensed sources. It is a puzzle, then, that the values of H0 obtained with this method span a range from 50 to 100 km/s/Mpc. We investigate the complex structure of the sources as the underlying physical explanation of the wide spread in values of the Hubble constant based on gravitational lensing.  We propose using the value of H0 known from other techniques to spatially resolve the origin of the variable emission once the time delay is measured. We follow this approach by combining the temporal resolution of Fermi-LAT, the angular resolution of radio telescopes, and the independently derived Hubble constant, to resolve the spatial origin of gamma-ray flares in the strongly lensed source B2 0218+35.