Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter Learning

Tuesday, 22 September 2020, 12:35   (virtual room G)

Finding a Needle in a Haystack: the search for gravitational lenses

Erica Hopkins^1,2, Fabian Gieseke^3,4, Joachim Wambsganss^2, Kai Polsterer^1
HITS gGmbH, Heidelberg University ARI, University of Münster, University of Copenhagen

Gravitational lenses are a vital tool for astronomers. They can help with better understanding gravity and dark matter. However, there are few known lens systems available to researchers due to their rarity combined with the difficulty associated with discovering them. While older surveys have often been thoroughly searched, many newer, and deeper, surveys provide an unsearched or undersearched data set of potential lens systems. We hope to use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to systematically search through the data to identify potential lens systems.