Bayesian estimates of astronomical time delays between gravitationally lensed stochastic light curves

DOI10.1214/17-AOAS1027zbMATH Open1380.62275arXiv1602.01462MaRDI QIDQ137845FDOQ137845

Authors: Kaisey Mandel, David A. Van Dyk, Vinay L. Kashyap, Xiao-Li Meng, Aneta Siemiginowska, Hyungsuk Tak, Kaisey Mandel, David A. van Dyk, Vinay L. Kashyap, Aneta Siemiginowska, Xiao-Li Meng, Hyungsuk Tak 

Publication date: 1 September 2017

Published in: The Annals of Applied Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The gravitational field of a galaxy can act as a lens and deflect the light emitted by a more distant object such as a quasar. Strong gravitational lensing causes multiple images of the same quasar to appear in the sky. Since the light in each gravitationally lensed image traverses a different path length from the quasar to the Earth, fluctuations in the source brightness are observed in the several images at different times. The time delay between these fluctuations can be used to constrain cosmological parameters and can be inferred from the time series of brightness data or light curves of each image. To estimate the time delay, we construct a model based on a state-space representation for irregularly observed time series generated by a latent continuous-time Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. We account for microlensing, an additional source of independent long-term extrinsic variability, via a polynomial regression. Our Bayesian strategy adopts a Metropolis-Hastings within Gibbs sampler. We improve the sampler by using an ancillarity-sufficiency interweaving strategy and adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo. We introduce a profile likelihood of the time delay as an approximation of its marginal posterior distribution. The Bayesian and profile likelihood approaches complement each other, producing almost identical results; the Bayesian method is more principled but the profile likelihood is simpler to implement. We demonstrate our estimation strategy using simulated data of doubly- and quadruply-lensed quasars, and observed data from quasars Q0957+561 and J1029+2623.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01462

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zbMATH Keywords

Metropolis-Hastingsprofile likelihoodtime seriesGibbs samplerOrnstein-Uhlenbeck processadaptive MCMCancillarity-sufficiency interweaving strategyBayesian estimatesgravitational lensingJ1029+2623LSSTmicrolensingQ0957+561quasar

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Time series, auto-correlation, regression, etc. in statistics (GARCH) (62M10) Applications of statistics to physics (62P35) Equations of motion in general relativity and gravitational theory (83C10) General questions in astronomy and astrophysics (85A04)

Cited In (13)

• Finding the most distant quasars using Bayesian selection methods
• When should modes of inference disagree? Some simple but challenging examples
• Estimation of Weak Lensing Parameters by Stochastic Integration
• A mathematical theory of stochastic microlensing. I: Random time delay functions and lensing maps
• Towards a new proposal for the time delay in gravitational lensing
• Time delay in black hole gravitational lensing as a distance estimator
• Robust and Accurate Inference via a Mixture of Gaussian and Student’s t Errors
• A Repelling–Attracting Metropolis Algorithm for Multimodality
• On modeling galaxy-scale strong lens systems
• Multivariate \(\alpha\)-stable distributions: VAR(1) processes, measures of dependence and their estimations
• A robust Bayesian meta-analysis for estimating the Hubble constant via time delay cosmography
• Uncovering delayed patterns in noisy and irregularly sampled time series: an astronomy application
• A Bayesian approach to astronomical time delay estimations

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