Related papers: Is Gravitational Lensing by Intercluster Filaments…
Alignments in the angular momentum vectors of galaxies can induce large scale correlations in their projected orientations. Such alignments arise from the tidal torques exerted on neighboring proto-galaxies by the smoothly varying shear…
Weak gravitational lensing due to nearby structures, such as the Coma cluster, and the Local Supercluster can be expected to polarize images of distant galaxies by ${\cal O}(0.2%\Omega)$ with coherence over scales of tens of square degrees.…
Strong gravitational lenses come in many forms, but are typically divided into two populations: galaxies, and groups and clusters of galaxies. The largest objects in the Universe (i.e. galaxy clusters) are highly irregular and composed of…
The phenomena customly called Dark Matter or Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) have been argued by Bekenstein (2004) to be the consequences of a covariant scalar field, controlled by a free function (related to the MOND interpolating…
When gravitational waves pass through the nuclear star clusters of galactic lenses, they may be microlensed by the stars. Such microlensing can cause potentially observable beating patterns on the waveform due to waveform superposition and…
Two colour photometry of the cluster A1689 reveals a `relative magnification-bias' between lensed blue and red background galaxies, arising from a dependence of the faint galaxy count-slope on colour. The colour distribution is skewed…
Gravitational waves (GWs) from distant sources such as inspiralling and merging stellar-mass compact binaries, intermediate-mass and supermassive-binary-black-hole can be gravitationally lensed by intervening objects, ranging from stars and…
Gravitational lenses can provide crucial information on the geometry of the Universe, on the cosmological scenario of formation of its structures as well as on the history of its components with look-back time. In this review, I focus on…
Weak gravitational lensing is considered to be one of the most powerful tools to study the mass and the mass distribution of galaxy clusters. However, weak lensing mass reconstructions are plagued by the so-called mass-sheet degeneracy--the…
This paper and the others in the series challenge the standard model of the effects of gravitational lensing on observations at large distances. We show that due to the cumulative effect of lensing, areas corresponding to an observed solid…
We highlight phenomenological aspects of Verlinde's recent proposal to account for the mass anomalies in galactic systems without dark matter -- in particular in their relation to MOND. Welcome addition to the MOND lore as it is, this…
The measurement of the integrated optical polarization of weakly gravitationally lensed galaxies can provide considerable constraints on lens models. The method outlined depends on fact that the orientation of the direction of optical…
Weak gravitational lensing studies of galaxy clusters often assume a spherical cluster model to simplify the analysis, but some recent studies have suggested this simplifying assumption may result in large biases in estimated cluster masses…
Gravitational-wave (GW) observations by a network of ground-based laser interferometric detectors allow us to probe the nature of GW polarizations. This would be an interesting test of general relativity (GR), since GR predicts only two…
We study the amplitude of the weak gravitational lensing signal as a function of stellar mass around a sample of relatively isolated galaxies. This selection of lenses simplifies the interpretation of the observations, which consist of data…
The validity of MOND and TeVeS models of modified gravity has been recently tested by using lensing techniques, with the conclusion that a non-trivial component in the form of dark matter is needed in order to match the observations. In…
While our current cosmological model places galaxy clusters at the nodes of a filament network (the cosmic web), we still struggle to detect these filaments at high redshifts. We perform a weak lensing study for a sample of 16 massive,…
Galaxies are gigantic physical systems having a typical size of many tens of thousands of light years. Thus any change at the center of the galaxy will affect the rim only tens of millennia later. Those retardation effects seems to be…
The morphology of galaxy clusters reflects the epoch at which they formed and hence depends on the value of the mean cosmological density, Omega. Recent studies have shown that the distribution of dark matter in clusters can be mapped from…
We quantify the uncertainty in weak lensing mass estimates of clusters of galaxies, caused by distant (uncorrelated) large scale structure along the line of sight. We find that the effect is fairly small for deep observations (20<R<26) of…