SMILE: Discriminating milli-lens systems in a VLBI pilot project

Copyright and License

© The Authors 2025.

Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acknowledgement

We thank the anonymous referee for the very useful suggestions and comments on the manuscript. F.P., C.C., D.A., A.K., V.M. & D.B. acknowledge support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon ERC Grants 2021 programme under grant agreement No. 101040021. We thank Rocco Lico for the useful discussions. We would also like to thank Leonid Petrov for maintaining the Astrogeo VLBI FITS image database and A. Bertarini, L. Vega Garcia, N. Corey, Y. Cui, L. Gurvits, X. He, T. Koryukova, Y. Y. Kovalev, S.-S. Lee, R. Lico, E. Liuzzo, A. Marscher, S. Jorstad, C. Marvin, D. Homan, J.-L. Gomez, M. Lister, A. Pushkarev, E. Ros, T. Savolainen, L. Petrov, A. Popkov, K. Sokolovski, A. Tao, G. Taylor, A. de Witt, M. Xu, and B. Zhang for making VLBI images they produced publicly available. We found that the practice of uploading VLBI images to a publicly available database brings great benefits to the scientific community. The European VLBI Network is a joint facility of independent European, African, Asian, and North American radio astronomy institutes. Scientific results from data presented in this publication are derived from the following EVN project code(s): EC071. This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement. Funding for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey V has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Participating Institutions. SDSS acknowledges support and resources from the Center for High-Performance Computing at the University of Utah. SDSS telescopes are located at Apache Point Observatory, funded by the Astrophysical Research Consortium and operated by New Mexico State University, and at Las Campanas Observatory, operated by the Carnegie Institution for Science. The SDSS web site is http://www.sdss.org. SDSS is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the SDSS Collaboration, including Caltech, The Carnegie Institution for Science, Chilean National Time Allocation Committee (CNTAC) ratified researchers, The Flatiron Institute, the Gotham Participation Group, Harvard University, Heidelberg University, The Johns Hopkins University, L’Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP), Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (MPIA Heidelberg), Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik (MPE), Nanjing University, National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC), New Mexico State University, The Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the Stellar Astrophysics Participation Group, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, University of Arizona, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Toronto, University of Utah, University of Virginia, Yale University, and Yunnan University.

Data Availability

The appendices containing VLBI images and tables of the remaining sources, as well as radio spectra and optical images can be found on Zenodo.