{"paper":{"title":"Strong gravitational lensing's 'external shear' is not shear","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["astro-ph.GA"],"primary_cat":"astro-ph.CO","authors_text":"Amy Etherington, Andrew Robertson, Anna Niemiec, Anton M. Koekemoer, Aristeidis Amvrosiadis, Brenda L. Frye, Carlos S. Frenk, Charles L. Steinhardt, David Harvey, David J. Lagattuta, Ellen Sirks, Guillaume Mahler, James W. Nightingale, Jose M. Diego, Marceau Limousin, Mathilde Jauzac, Qiuhan He, Ran Li, Richard Massey, Shaun Cole, Sut-Ieng Tam, Xiaoyue Cao","submitted_at":"2023-01-12T19:00:05Z","abstract_excerpt":"The distribution of mass in galaxy-scale strong gravitational lenses is often modelled as an elliptical power law plus 'external shear', which notionally accounts for neighbouring galaxies and cosmic shear. We show that it does not. Except in a handful of rare systems, the best-fit values of external shear do not correlate with independent measurements of shear: from weak lensing in 45 Hubble Space Telescope images, or in 50 mock images of lenses with complex distributions of mass. Instead, the best-fit shear is aligned with the major or minor axis of 88% of lens galaxies; and the amplitude of"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2301.05244","kind":"arxiv","version":3},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2301.05244/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}