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We use thirteen seasons of R-band photometry from the 1.2m Leonard Euler Swiss Telescope at La Silla to examine microlensing variability in the quadruply-imaged lensed quasar WFI 2026-4536. The lightcurves exhibit ${\sim}\,0.2\,\text{mag}$ of uncorrelated variability across all epochs and a prominent single feature of ${\sim}\,0.1\,\text{mag}$ within a single season. We analyze this variability to constrain the size of the quasar's accretion disk. Adopting a nominal inclination of 60$^\text{o}$, we find an accretion disk scale radius of $\log(r_s/\text{cm}) = 15.74^{+0.34}_{-0.29}$ at a rest-frame wavelength of $2043\,\unicode{xC5}$, and we estimate a black hole mass of $\log(M_{\text{BH}}/M_{\odot}) = 9.18^{+0.39}_{-0.34}$, based on the CIV line in VLT spectra. This size measurement is fully consistent with the Quasar Accretion Disk Size - Black Hole Mass relation, providing another system in which the accretion disk is larger than predicted by thin disk theory., Comment: 26 pages, 8 figures, Appendix with data table, pg 12-25

The MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array (MINERVA) is a dedicated observatory of four 0.7m robotic telescopes fiber-fed to a KiwiSpec spectrograph. The MINERVA mission is to discover super-Earths in the habitable zones of nearby stars. This can be accomplished with MINERVA's unique combination of high precision and high cadence over long time periods. In this work, we detail changes to the MINERVA facility that have occurred since our previous paper. We then describe MINERVA's robotic control software, the process by which we perform 1D spectral extraction, and our forward modeling Doppler pipeline. In the process of improving our forward modeling procedure, we found that our spectrograph's intrinsic instrumental profile is stable for at least nine months. Because of that, we characterized our instrumental profile with a time-independent, cubic spline function based on the profile in the cross dispersion direction, with which we achieved a radial velocity precision similar to using a conventional "sum-of-Gaussians" instrumental profile: 1.8 m s$^{-1}$ over 1.5 months on the RV standard star HD 122064. Therefore, we conclude that the instrumental profile need not be perfectly accurate as long as it is stable. In addition, we observed 51 Peg and our results are consistent with the literature, confirming our spectrograph and Doppler pipeline are producing accurate and precise radial velocities., Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, submitted to PASP, Peer-Reviewed and Accepted

We present 13 seasons of $R$-band photometry of the quadruply-lensed quasar WFI 2033-4723 from the 1.3m SMARTS telescope at CTIO and the 1.2m Euler Swiss Telescope at La Silla, in which we detect microlensing variability of $\sim0.2$ mags on a timescale of $\sim$6 years. Using a Bayesian Monte Carlo technique, we analyze the microlensing signal to obtain a measurement of the size of this system's accretion disk of $\log (r_s/{\rm cm}) = 15.86^{+0.25}_{-0.27}$ at $\lambda_{rest} = 2481{\rm \AA}$, assuming a $60^\circ$ inclination angle. We confirm previous measurements of the BC and AB time delays, and we obtain a tentative measurement of the delay between the closely spaced A1 and A2 images of $\Delta t_{A1A2} = t_{A1} - t_{A2} = -3.9^{+3.4}_{-2.2}$ days. We conclude with an update to the Quasar Accretion Disk Size - Black Hole Mass Relation, in which we confirm that the accretion disk size predictions from simple thin disk theory are too small., Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, Accepted by ApJ

We measure the projected density profile, shape and alignment of the stellar and dark matter mass distribution in 11 strong-lens galaxies. We find that the projected dark matter density profile - under the assumption of a Chabrier stellar initial mass function - shows significant variation from galaxy to galaxy. Those with an outermost image beyond $\sim 10$ kpc are very well fit by a projected NFW profile; those with images within 10 kpc appear to be more concentrated than NFW, as expected if their dark haloes contract due to baryonic cooling. We find that over several half-light radii, the dark matter haloes of these lenses are rounder than their stellar mass distributions. While the haloes are never more elliptical than $e_{dm} = 0.2$, their stars can extend to $e_* > 0.2$. Galaxies with high dark matter ellipticity and weak external shear show strong alignment between light and dark; those with strong shear ($\gamma \gtrsim 0.1$) can be highly misaligned. This is reassuring since isolated misaligned galaxies are expected to be unstable. Our results provide a new constraint on galaxy formation models. For a given cosmology, these must explain the origin of both very round dark matter haloes and misaligned strong-lens systems., Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication by MNRAS