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12 April 2010
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Brendon Brewer (UC Santa Barbara)
'Modeling the Spiral Lens Galaxies of SWELLS'
The SWELLS project (SDSS WFPC2 Edge-on Late-type Lens Survey) has
observed a sample of gravitational lens systems in which the
deflectors are edge-on spiral galaxies. This gives us the opportunity
to study the mass profiles of spiral galaxies in detail, combining the
constraints from the lensed images with rotation curves and stellar
population synthesis models. However, lens modeling of these systems
is challenging due to the complex lens morphology and dust absorption.
In this talk I will describe our novel approach to lens modeling and
show how lensing provides constraints on the mass distribution that
can help to break the disk-halo degeneracy. As part of this talk I
will also present Diffusive Nested Sampling, an efficient and general
Markov Chain Monte Carlo method for solving challenging inference
problems.
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