FIRST-Optical-VLA survey for lensed radio lobes

Lensed lobes are a potentially richer source of information about galaxy mass distributions than lensed point sources, which have been the exclusive focus of other recent surveys. Our approach is to identify radio lobes in the Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty cm (FIRST, Cat. <VIII/71>) catalog and then search optical catalogs for coincident foreground galaxies, which are candidate lensing galaxies.

We then obtain higher resolution images of these targets at both optical and radio wavelengths and obtain optical spectra for the most promising candidates. We present maps of several radio lobes that are nearly coincident with galaxies. We have not found any new and unambiguous cases of gravitational lensing.