Rethinking Lensing and Lambda

Abstract

Strong gravitational lensing has traditionally been one of the few phenomena said to oppose a large cosmological constant; many analyses of lens statistics have given upper limits on $\Omega_\Lambda$ that are marginally inconsistent with the concordance cosmology. Those conclusions were based on models where the predicted number counts of galaxies at moderate redshifts (z~0.5-1) increased significantly with $\Omega_\Lambda$. I argue that the models should now be calibrated by counts of distant galaxies. When this is done lens statistics lose most of their sensitivity to the cosmological constant.