Gravitational lenses : time delays and the Hubble constant

The Hubble constant H0 is one of the most important parameters in cosmology, as it encodes the age of the Universe and is necessary for any distance determination at a cosmological scale. It is, however, only poorly constrained by traditional methods. The current favored value, H0 = 72±8 km s-1 Mpc-1, is provided by the HST Hubble constant Key Project (Freedman et al. 2001), which combines several Cepheid-calibrated distance indicators. This roughly 10% error nevertheless denotes only the statistical uncertainty in the determination of H0, while the possible systematical errors in the first step of the distance ladder (the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud) may be of the same order of magnitude. Time delays between gravitationally lensed images of distant quasars can yield a more precise measurement of the Hubble constant, on a truly cosmic scale, and independently of any local distance calibrator. At the beginning of this thesis, time delays had been measured in only ten lensed systems, nine of which gave H0 estimates. However before 2004, no concerted and long term action has succeeded to apply the time delay method at a level of precision really competitive with other techniques. The major difficulties arise from the modeling of the lens mass distribution, and from the uncertainty on the time delay measurement itself, which was typically of about 10% in past monitoring programs. COSMOGRAIL (COSmological MOnitoring of GRAvItational Lenses) is an international collaboration initiated in April 2004 at the Laboratory of Astrophysics of EPFL, and which aims at measuring precise time delays for most known lensed quasars, in order to determine the Hubble constant down to an uncertainty of a few percent. This thesis took place at the beginning of COSMOGRAIL and consisted in setting up this large photometric monitoring. It addressed both issues of carrying out accurate photometry of faint blended sources and of obtaining well sampled light curves, in order to measure precise time delays. As part of the COSMOGRAIL project, I have been managing the monitoring of over twenty gravitationally lensed quasars with the 1-2m telescopes involved both in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, and organizing the data. The first crucial work of this thesis was then to develop an automated reduction pipeline able to produce an homogeneous data set from images acquired with very different telescopes. This pipeline was also needed to perform aperture photometry of all lensed quasars, in order to study their variability and define the monitoring priorities. The powerful MCS deconvolution algorithm (Magain, Courbin, & Sohy 1998) was greatly used in this work and allowed to highly improve the image resolution, with the aim of obtaining accurate photometric measurements of the individual quasar lensed images. I have finally tested and improved three different numerical techniques to determine time delays between the quasar components from their light curves. In this