Program: GN-2014A-Q-22

The whispy arcs of gravitationally lensed galaxies at redshifts z>8 offer a view of the Universe at a time long before mass assembled to the structures we see around us today. Lensing studies, the only methodology that affords spatial resolution for such far-away objects, has so far been conducted using massive galaxy clusters. While these systems top the ranking for mass in the nearby Universe (z<0.5) they are few and far between. Conversely, compact galaxy groups offer similar densities and therefore equal lensing capabilities, and occur much more frequently to boot. We have isolated the eight best candidate 'compact lenses' from the GAMA groups catalogue, the premier sample of massive compact groups currently available to z~0.4. We propose to image these lensing candidates with GMOS-N, which will deliver of order 10 lensed galaxies at z>8 and pave the way for hundreds of lensing detections at 2<z<20 with HST and JWST.