Cosmic alignment towards the radio Einstein ring PKS 1830-211

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  • 1 February 2002
Abstract
Optical and near-IR Hubble Space Telescope and Gemini-North adaptive optics images, further improved through deconvolution, are used to explore the gravitationally lensed radio source PKS 1830-211. We show that the line of sight to the quasar at z=2.507 is very busy with the presence, within 0.5 arcsec, from the source of: (i) a possible galactic main-sequence star, (ii) a red lensing galaxy visible only in H-band and (iii) a new object which colors and morphology match those of an almost face-on spiral. The V-I color and faint I magnitude of the latter suggest that it is associated with the molecular absorber seen towards PKS 1830-211, at z=0.89 rather than with the z=0.19 HI absorber previously reported in the spectrum of PKS 1830-211. While this discovery might ease the interpretation of the observed absorption lines, it also dramatically complicates the modeling of the lensing potential well, hence decreasing the interest of this system in terms of cosmological tool to measure H0 through time delay. This is the first case of a quasar lensed by an almost face-on spiral galaxy.

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