DARK ENERGY AND THE STATISTICAL STUDY OF THE OBSERVED IMAGE SEPARATIONS OF THE MULTIPLY-IMAGED SYSTEMS IN THE CLASS STATISTICAL SAMPLE

Abstract

The present day observations favour a universe which is flat, accelerated and composed of ~ 1/3 matter (baryonic + dark) and ~ 2/3 of a negative pressure component, usually referred to as dark energy or quintessence. The Cosmic Lens All Sky Survey (CLASS), the largest radio-selected galactic mass scale gravitational lens search project to date, has resulted in the largest sample suitable for statistical analysis. In the work presented here, we exploit observed image separations of the multiply-imaged lensed radio sources in the sample. We use two different tests: (1) image separation distribution function n(Δθ) of the lensed radio sources and (2) Δθ pred versus Δθ obs as observational tools to constrain the cosmological parameters w and Ωm. The results are in concordance with the bounds imposed by other cosmological tests.