Identifying Lensed Quasars and measuring their Time-Delays in Unresolved Systems

Detecting lensed quasar systems and estimating their time delays using the unresolved joint light curves can be the next frontier among the cosmological probes in the near future. One can get the independent measurement of the Hubble constant from the time delays but without requiring the systems to be resolved a priori followed by monitoring the image light curves using high-resolution telescopes for years. In this work, we propose a novel technique that can identify lensed quasars only using the observed unresolved light curves and without assuming a template or any prior information. Following a set of conservative selection criteria that gives zero false-positive outcome, we can accurately estimate the time delay for almost all the lensed systems with marginal noise in the data. For the case of noisy data, our approach can still correctly identify a substantial number of lensed systems with high certainty and measure the time delay accurately.