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# The effect of lensing on the identification of bright SCUBA galaxies.

## 1 Introduction

The intentional use of gravitational lenses has been a particularly profitable route to probe the nature of the submm galaxy population (Smail, Ivison & Blain 1997; Chapman et al. 2002a; Smail et al. 2002; Cowie, Barger & Kneib 2002). The lens amplification facilitates the identification and characterisation of counterparts at other wavelengths (Smail et al. 2002), and has produced some of the best-studied examples of the submm population (e.g. Ivison et al. 1998, 2000; Soucail et al. 1999). Blank field submm surveys have also been undertaken (e.g. Hughes et al. 1998; Barger et al. 1999; Eales et al. 1999, 2000; Borys et al. 2002; Scott et al. 2002; Webb et al. 2002), these cover large contiguous areas and are in principle simpler to analyse than the lens surveys. However, without the boost from a cluster lens, identifying counterparts in the blank field surveys has proved to be an arduous task. For example, significant effort has been expended in attempting to track down the brightest submm source in the Hubble Deep Field North, HDF 850.1, with no clear resolution yet.

The published blank field SCUBA surveys have reliably identified a small fraction of their submm sources in the optical and near-infrared (Gear et al. 2000; Lutz et al. 2001), with a mere handful having spectroscopic redshifts, e.g. Westphal-MMD11 (Chapman et al. 2002b); CUDSS 3.8, 3.10, 14.13 and 14.18 (Eales et al. 2000; Webb et al. 2002). Although the spectral properties of some of these proposed counterparts appear reasonable given their redshifts, several of them must have very low dust temperatures compared to similar luminosity galaxies in the local Universe, if they are to produce the observed submm emission at the proposed redshifts, $`z<1`$ (Eales et al. 1999; Dunne & Eales 2001).

There are only three SCUBA galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts which have been confirmed in CO line emission, all these lie at $`z1`$ (e.g. Frayer et al. 1998, 1999), consistent with the estimates of the median redshift for the whole population of $`z2`$–3 from their submm and radio spectral properties (Hughes et al. 1998; Carilli & Yun 2000; Smail et al. 2000; Yun & Carilli 2002), with few galaxies at $`z1`$. The existence of a moderate fraction of SCUBA galaxies with redshifts of $`z1`$ would therefore indicate a bimodal redshift distribution for the population, and suggest that two physically distinct classes of SCUBA galaxies contribute to the faint submm counts. Alternatively, these apparent low redshift counterparts could be misidentifications – but why are they so frequent?

Given the expected high median redshift of the submm population and the steep number counts seen for the brighter submm sources (Blain et al. 1999; Fox et al. 2002), gravitational lensing by foreground galaxies is one possible explanation for the anomolously high rate of association of submm sources with low redshift, optically bright galaxies. Surveys of distant QSOs have provided estimates of the rate of lensing for optical samples of $`z>1`$ QSOs, 0.7% (e.g. Surdej et al. 1993; Jaunsen et al. 1995; Kochanek et al. 1995, see also Kochanek 1993). A more reliable constraint comes from lens searches in the radio waveband where obscuration in the lens is not a concern, these suggest that a modest fraction of flux limited radio-loud AGN samples, 0.25–0.57%, are strongly lensed by field galaxies at $`z<1`$ (e.g. King et al. 1999; Myers et al. 1999). This same population of lenses will also act on the similarly distant SCUBA population, although differences in the intrinsic count slope of the two populations will lead to a different rate of occurence of strong (and weak) lensing in flux limited submm samples. The issue of the effects of gravitational lensing on field surveys in the submm waveband have been discussed by Blain (1996; 1998), who suggested that $`2`$% of SCUBA galaxies with S$`{}_{850\mu \mathrm{m}}{}^{}10`$ mJy will be amplified by $`2\times `$ by foreground lenses. The number of submm sources in published samples is now sufficient that we should be able to observationally test this prediction and in doing so investigate the nature of those SCUBA galaxies which apparently lie at $`z1`$.

## 2 Observations and Reduction

We have embarked on a program to obtain spectroscopic redshifts for a large sample of radio-selected, optically bright submm sources. The goal of this project is to identify the optically-brightest SCUBA galaxies, such as SMM J02399$``$0136 and SMM J14011+0252 (Ivison et al. 1998; 2000, 2001) which are suitable for detailed follow-up on 10-m class telescopes. To achieve this we extend the previous work on submm observations of optically-faint radio-selected sources (e.g. Chapman et al. 2001b) to brighter counterparts. Chapman et al. (2002e) have demonstrated the success of this approach, recovering $``$60% of the SCUBA population. The expectation is that the remaining 40% include both optically luminous SCUBA galaxies (Ivison et al. 1998, 2000) and very high redshift sources which are too faint in the radio waveband to be detected (e.g. Frayer et al. 2000). The bias against very distant SCUBA galaxies in radio surveys depends on their dust temperature: hotter sources can be seen out to higher redshifts, $`z>3`$, while colder sources are more difficult to detect (Chapman et al. 2002d).

Fig. 2: Keck/ESI spectra of SMM J16370+4106 (upper panel) and SMM J22173+0014 (lower panel). We identify redshifted emission lines in the spectra of both galaxies which place them at $`z<1`$.

### 2.1 ESI Observations

The initial observations for our survey of optically bright SCUBA sources involved spectroscopy of 7 sources with the Echellette Spectrograph and Imager (ESI) on the Keck II telescope in 2001 July. The echellette mode provides complete coverage from 0.32–1 $`\mu `$m at high spectral resolution $``$1Å, allowing very good sky subtraction into the atmospheric OH forest at the red end of the spectra. The spectral integrations were 1800 s for each source. High signal-to-noise flats and wavelength calibrations were taken shortly before the observations of each target, and fluxes were calibrated using spectra of red standard stars. The data were reduced with the makee software using the reduction recipe described in Barlow & Sargent (1997).

These observations generated redshifts for five new candidate counterparts to submm galaxies, to be discussed in a future paper. However, the proposed optically-bright counterparts to two of these sources lie at much lower redshifts than expected from their radio and submm properties, and we discuss these further here. These two sources are: SMM J16370+4106 from the SCUBA survey of Scott et al. (2002) and SMM J22173+0014 from Chapman et al. (2001a). We show radio/optical overlays of these two sources in Fig. 1 and summarise their properties in Table 1. The calibrated spectra are shown in Fig. 2 with their spectral features identified. These spectra show that the proposed optically-bright counterpart to SMM J16370+4106 lies at $`z=0.845`$, while the galaxy identified with SMM J22173+0014 has $`z=0.510`$. We note that the spectrum of SMM J22173+0014 shows broad lines indicative of a low luminosity type I AGN, although such activity is not infrequent in the high-redshift field population (Cowie et al. 1996).

As we discuss below the properties of both of these systems strongly suggest that the optically bright, spectroscopically-identified galaxies are not in fact the source of the submm emission, but instead they may represent foreground gravitational lenses which are amplifying the more distant, optically-faint SCUBA galaxy.

## 3 Analysis and Discussion

We have cataloged two new, $`>10`$ mJy submm sources which are within 1–2′′ of $`I<21.5`$ galaxies at $`z=0.510`$ and $`0.845`$. In the absence of detections in deep, high resolution radio maps, the coarse spatial resolution of the SCUBA detections would mean that these offsets would not be significant, and combined with the low surface density of $`I<21.5`$ galaxies this would lead to a high probability that the submm source is associated with the optically bright galaxy. There are two possible explanations for these associations: 1) either the optically-bright galaxies are the source of the submm emission, or 2) these galaxies are lensing the true submm source, which is then both fainter and lies at much higher redshifts.

If the spectroscopically-identified galaxies are the source of the submm and radio emission then we can estimate the characteristic dust temperatures, Td, which these galaxies must have to be consistent with the measured radio/submm spectral index. We list these values in Table 1 and compare them to the distribution of dust temperatures (Dunne et al. 2000) as a function of galaxy luminosity seen locally in Fig. 3. The distribution is shown as log normal, consistent with the best fit distribution for the local 1.2 Jy IRAS sample (Chapman et al. 2002f).

In the case that these systems represent gravitational lenses we list for comparison in Table 1 the properties of three sources from published SCUBA surveys which are all believed to be lensed by foreground galaxies: SMM J00266+1708 (Frayer et al. 2000) and SMM J04431+0210 (Smail et al. 1999), both of these lie within $`2^{\prime \prime }`$, but are not coincident with, bright foreground galaxies (images of these systems can be found in the relevant references). We also include the candidate lensed source, HDF 850.1 from Hughes et al. (1998). The millimetre interferometry map of HDF 850.1 by Downes et al. (1999) indicates that the submm source is offset by 0.7″ from a moderately bright Elliptical galaxy at modest redshift, suggesting it is likely to be lensed (Downes et al. 1999). Very recently an extremely faint $`K`$-band source has been found at the millimetre position, providing further support for the identification of this system as a high redshift lensed SCUBA galaxy (Dunlop et al. 2002).

We now discuss the properties of the two new submm sources to attempt to distinguish between the two possible explanations of their properties.

For SMM J16370+4106 we find a close pair of radio sources – the brighter radio component is consistent with being coincident with the optically-bright galaxy, within the optical/radio astrometric uncertainty ($`0.2`$″). The second, fainter radio component lies $`2^{\prime \prime }`$ east of the bright optical galaxy. The two radio components could both be associated with the bright galaxy as the chance of a radio/submm source being lensed by another foreground radio source is low, due to the low radio source density at these flux levels. At the same time, the astrometric uncertainty does not allow us to reject the possibility that this system is a highly amplified double image lensing configuration, straddling the optical lens, which would circumvent the radio source number density/probability argument. The required Td for SMM J16370+4106 at $`z=0.845`$ is $`23\pm 5`$ K, placing it $`4\sigma `$ below the local relation in Fig. 3 and strengthening the lensing hypothesis.

SMM J22173+0014 lies only 30″ from a known submm source at the centre of a $`z=3.1`$ galaxy overdensity (Steidel et al. 1998), yet appears to be associated with a luminous early-type spiral at $`z=0.510`$. However, the radio centroid is significantly offset from the optical galaxy center, five times the relative astrometric error in the VLA/optical frames, which is dominated by the source centroiding, $`\mathrm{FWHM}/(2\times S/N)=5\mathrm{}/17=0.3\mathrm{}`$, with the radio emission falling close to a faint $`K`$-band extension from the galaxy. The HST image obtained subsequent to the spectroscopic observations reveals a morphologically complex systems, reminiscent of a merger, coincident with this extension. In addition, the calculated Td required to reproduce the radio/submm spectral index at this redshift is only $`18\pm 2`$ K, putting this source $`5\sigma `$ below the local mean Td for its luminosity (Fig. 3). Together, these arguments suggest that SMM J22173+0014 is a distant submm source lensed by the foreground galaxy at $`z=0.510`$. The configuration of this system is very similar to that seen in SMM J00266+1708 and SMM J04431+0210, which have bright edge-on spiral galaxies within 2–3′′ of the submm source (Frayer et al. 2000; Smail et al. 1999). These configurations are also consistent with the results from Blain, Möller & Maller (1999) and Bartelmann & Loeb (1998), who have shown that nearly edge-on spirals provide a high lensing probability, due to the large projected surface mass density.

Fig. 3: The distribution of Td versus far-infrared luminosity for local luminous, dusty galaxies (circles), the best fit relationship is shown as a solid line and the error bounds by dashed lines. We show our two new systems by filled squares, assuming that the submm and radio emission is associated with the bright optical galaxy, as well as the lensed submm sources from the literature (open squares). We also show two distant, luminous ISO-FIRBACK galaxies from Chapman et al. (2002d) which have low dust temperatures (stars).

While there is strong evidence that the two new submm sources are both lensed systems, we first need to consider selection effects in the radio/submm sample. The local luminous IRAS galaxies in Fig. 3 show a broad distribution in Td, with no examples as cold as the SCUBA galaxies would need to be to be $`z<1`$. However, the IRAS galaxies represent a restframe 60-$`\mu `$m selected sample, while the SCUBA galaxies are initially identified in terms of their 1.4-GHz and 850-$`\mu `$m emission. This will tend to bias their selection towards galaxies with lower Td (Eales et al. 1999). This effect has recently been demonstrated for two SCUBA sources from the ISO-FIRBACK survey (Chapman et al. 2002d). These 170-$`\mu `$m selected sources have accurate radio positions which identify them with relatively low redshift galaxies ($`z=`$0.45 and 0.91) which both exhibit clear merger morphologies. The best fit dust temperatures for these luminous galaxies (calculated for consistancy with the sample in Fig. 3) are 28 K and 33 K, indicating that some cold, but luminous galaxies do exist at high redshifts (Fig. 3). There is also some evidence that the dust temperature distribution may be broader at higher redshifts (Chapman et al. 2002f), making these apparently cold sources more common. The 1-$`\sigma `$ errors on SMM J16370+4106 overlap with those of the cold FIRBACK sources, suggesting that the cold dust explanation is conceivable for this source. However, none of these galaxies have as low Td as is required for SMM J22173+0014 and we therefore conclude that SMM J22173+0014 most probably represents a lensed SCUBA galaxy.

Assuming that at least one, and perhaps both, of these two submm sources are likely to be lensed we now estimate the proportion of similarly lensed sources in a typical SCUBA survey. Our survey started with a subsample of the total submm population which were radio identified, with the requirement that the radio source aligned with an $`I<23.5`$ optical galaxy to within 2″. The fraction of submm sources in total which have a bright ($`I<23.5`$) galaxy nearby (Chapman et al. 2002c) represents 16% of radio identified submm population. Radio selection detects $`60`$% of all bright ($`S>5`$ mJy) submm galaxies. We found above that 1–2 from 5 sources in our Keck/ESI sample were likely to be lensed. This implies 3–5% of the radio detected submm population could be lensing candidates, with a lower limit of 2–3% for the whole SCUBA population.

We have also discussed three lensed SCUBA galaxies from the literature which are very similar to the two candidate systems presented here. The submm source HDF 850.1 appears to be lensed by a foreground elliptical galaxy, this gives a rate of lensed sources of 1/8, or $`13`$% with a large uncertainty, for the HDF sources discussed by Hughes et al. (1998) and Serjeant et al. (2002). The other two lensed sources come from the Smail et al. (2002) cluster sample, these are of course more likely to suffer galaxy-galaxy lensing due to the high foreground galaxy concentration in the clusters used in this survey. For that reason we take the rate of galaxy-lensing from this survey as an upper limit, 2/15 sources, or $`13`$%. Overall this suggests that around 3–5% of submm sources from SCUBA surveys are likely to be gravitationally amplified by foreground galaxies.

The rate of lensing we find is nearly an order of magnitude higher than the incidence of multiple-imaging in similarly distant QSO samples, which combined with the radio morphologies of the galaxies discussed here indicates that these are not highly-amplified, multiply-imaged SCUBA sources. With our current crude knowledge of the lensing configurations in these systems, it is impossible to produce detailed lens models for these sources. However, the relative separation of the source and lens, along with the apparent lack of multiple images suggests amplifications of $`<5`$.

The probability of lensing in SCUBA surveys depends on the form of the submm counts, with the steep count slope seen for submm sources brighter than 5 mJy (Scott et al. 2002), $`2`$% of the $`10`$ mJy sources could be amplified by $`2\times `$ (Blain 1998). This figure is roughly in agreement with our findings, especially if SMM J16370+4106 actually represents a cold, luminous galaxy.

We note that weak amplification bias similar to, but weaker than, that invoked here has been invoked as a possible explanation for the strong cross correlation between foreground bright galaxies and submm sources seen by Almaini et al. (2002). We also note that lensing is also expected to manifest at the $`1`$% level given the surface density of sources now reached in the deepest radio maps, $`15\mu `$Jy (e.g. Formalont et al. 2002; Owen et al. 2002). However, the effect cannot be much greater as $`\mu `$Jy count slopes are close to Euclidean, and the $`N(z)`$ is less extended than for the submm-selected samples ($`<z>0.6`$, Richards et al. 1999; Barger, Cowie & Richards 2000; Chapman et al. 2002c).

## 4 Conclusions

We have identified two submm sources which have apparent counterparts which are optically bright galaxies, $`I<21.5`$, lying at modest redshifts, $`z<1`$. We suggest two possible explanation for these sources, and similar systems in the literature. The first explanation states that the suggested identifications are correct, in which case these galaxies represent a class of very cold, luminous submm source (Chapman et al. 2002d). For one source, SMM J16370+4106 at $`z=0.845`$, this interpretation appears possible, however, it seems less likely for the second and even colder source, SMM J22173+0014. In both cases, the most powerful test to reject this hypothesis would be to confirm the absence of luminous molecular CO emission at the redshift of the optically bright galaxies.

The second explanation for these systems is that the optically bright galaxy represents a foreground gravitational lens, which is amplifying the more distant SCUBA source. This explanation is consistent with both the observed source configurations and their spectral properties. In this case we estimate that up to 3–5% of the $`>10`$ mJy submm sources in blank field SCUBA surveys could be gravitationally amplified by foreground galaxies. The most important result of this amplification is that it leads to the misidentification of the submm source with the nearby bright, and typically low redshift, galaxies. These misidentifications would produce a false tail of low-redshift, $`z1`$, submm sources in all far-infrared/submillimetre/millimetre surveys. This is especially a concern for those surveys where deep, high resolution data is not available to confirm the correspondance between the radio (pin-pointing the longer wavelength emission source) and optical sources with a precision of $`1^{\prime \prime }`$.

## Acknowledgements

We acknowledge our collaborators on the HST-SCUBA morphology project, R. Windhorst & E. Richards. SCC acknowledges support from NASA through HST grant 9174.1. IRS acknowledges support from a Royal Society URF and a Philip Leverhulme Prize Fellowship.