The Environments of SLACS Gravitational Lenses

Abstract

We report on an investigation of the environments of the SLACS sample of gravitational lenses. The local and global environments of the lenses are characterized using SDSS photometry and, when available, spectroscopy. We find that the lens systems that are best modelled with steeper than isothermal density profiles are more likely to have close companions than lenses with shallower than isothermal profiles. This suggests that the profile steepening may be caused by interactions with a companion galaxy as indicated by N-body simulations of group galaxies. The global environments of the SLACS lenses are typical of non-lensing SDSS galaxies with comparable properties to the lenses, and the richnesses of the lens groups are not as strongly correlated with the lens density profiles as the local environments. Furthermore, we investigate the possibility of line-of-sight contamination affecting the lens models but do not find a significant over-density of sources compared to lines of sight without lenses.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA