Spectroscopy of the fields of gravitational lenses

One remaining systematic is a bias from the additional mass due to a galaxy group at the lens redshift or along the sightline. We quantify this bias for more than 20 strong lenses that have well-sampled sightline mass distributions, focusing on the convergence {kappa} and shear {gamma}.

In 23% of these fields, a lens group contributes >=1% convergence bias; in 57%, there is a similarly significant line-of-sight group. For the nine time-delay lens systems, H0 is overestimated by 11_-2_^+3^% on average when groups are ignored. In 67% of fields with total {kappa}>=0.01, line-of-sight groups contribute >~2x more convergence than do lens groups, indicating that the lens group is not the only important mass.