A large population of strongly lensed faint submillimetre galaxies in future dark energy surveys inferred from JWST imaging

James Pearson, Stephen Serjeant, Wei-Hao Wang, Zhen-Kai Gao, Arif Babul, Scott Chapman, Chian-Chou Chen, David L Clements, Christopher J Conselice, James Dunlop, Lulu Fan, Luis C Ho, Ho Seong Hwang, Maciej Koprowski, MichałJ Michałowski, Hyunjin Shim

Abstract: Bright galaxies at submillimetre wavelengths from Herschel are now well known to be predominantly strongly gravitationally lensed. The same models that successfully predicted this strongly lensed population also predict about 1 per cent of faint 450 μm-selected galaxies from deep James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) surveys will also be strongly lensed. Follow-up ALMA campaigns have so far found one potential lens candidate, but without clear compelling evidence, for example, from lensing arcs. Here, we report the discovery of a compelling gravitational lens system confirming the lensing population predictions, with a zs = 3.4 ± 0.4 submm source lensed by a zspec = 0.360 foreground galaxy within the COSMOS field, identified through public JWST imaging of a 450 μm source in the SCUBA-2 Ultra Deep Imaging EAO Survey (STUDIES) catalogue. These systems will typically be well within the detectable range of future wide-field surveys such as Euclid and Roman, and since submillimetre galaxies are predominantly very red at optical/near-infrared wavelengths, they will tend to appear in near-infrared channels only. Extrapolating to the Euclid-Wide survey, we predict tens of thousands of strongly lensed near-infrared galaxies. This will be transformative for the study of dusty star-forming galaxies at cosmic noon, but will be a contaminant population in searches for strongly lensed ultra-high-redshift galaxies in Euclid and Roman.