Disentangling the dark and stellar mass through precise lens modelling of the JWST observation of lensed quasar WFI2033–4723

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ID: 332835
2026
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Abstract
Abstract We use high-resolution JWST/NIRCam imaging and measured time delays to model the quadruply imaged quasar WFI2033–4723 with a composite stellar plus dark-matter mass model. We first construct an elliptical power-law baseline model and recover Fermat-potential differences (fpd) consistent with previous HST-based and JWST-based analyses, providing a reference scale for composite modelling. We then replace the total mass profile with a physically motivated decomposition in which the stellar mass follows a multi-Gaussian expansion of the lens light, with a free radial mass-to-light gradient, and the dark matter is described by a generalized Navarro–Frenk–White (gNFW) halo. Using two external cosmological priors, Planck+DESI and Pantheon+SH0ES, the measured time delays constrain the mass-sheet-transformation freedom that would otherwise damage the stellar–dark-matter decomposition. In both cosmological cases, the stellar normalization lies between the expectations for Chabrier and Salpeter initial mass functions, while the radial mass-to-light gradient is not strongly required by the data (mildly positive). The dark matter halo has an inner slope γin ≃ 1.3, steeper than a standard NFW cusp, and the main astrophysical conclusions are insensitive to the adopted cosmological prior. This work shows that composite time-delay lens modelling can effectively separate baryons from dark matter. As a qualitative check, we reverse the logic and use our composite lens model without kinematic information to infer the cosmology instead. However, the strong degeneracy between H0 and the halo scale radius Rs prevents a robust standalone constraint.
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Authors Tian Li, Thomas E. Collett, Coleman Krawczyk, Wolfgang Enzi, Aymeric Galan
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Journal monthly notices of the royal astronomical society
Year 2026
DOI
10.1093/mnras/stag1986
URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stag1986
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