Related papers: PILOT and cosmic shear
Since the Universe is inhomogeneous on scales well below the Hubble radius, light bundles from distant galaxies are deflected and distorted by the tidal gravitational field of the large-scale matter distribution as they propagate through…
Cosmic shear measurements rely on our ability to measure and correct the Point Spread Function (PSF) of the observations. This PSF is measured using stars in the field, which give a noisy measure at random points in the field. Using Wiener…
Weak gravitational lensing surveys are rapidly becoming important tools to probe directly the mass density fluctuations in the universe and its background dynamics. Earlier studies have shown that it is possible to model the statistics of…
Observing sites at the East-Antarctic plateau are considered to provide exceptional conditions for astronomy. The aim of this work is to assess its potential for detecting transiting extrasolar planets through a comparison and combination…
As the volume and quality of modern galaxy surveys increase, so does the difficulty of measuring the cosmological signal imprinted in galaxy shapes. Weak gravitational lensing sourced by the most massive structures in the Universe generates…
Antarctica offers unique conditions for ground-based observations, such as low sky background in the infrared, improved seeing, and low turbulence and scintillation noise. These properties are particularly beneficial to imaging, precision…
An explicit full nulling scheme for cosmic shear observations is presented. It makes possible the construction of shear maps from extended source distributions for which the lens distance distribution is restricted to a definite interval.…
With the developments of large galaxy surveys or cosmic shear surveys it is now possible to map the dark matter distribution at truly cosmological scales. Detailed examinations of the statistical properties of the dark matter distribution…
The Euclid mission is a visionary project undertaken by the European Space Agency (ESA) to probe the universe's evolution and geometry by surveying the position and gravitational shape distortion of billions of galaxies. These observations…
We define a new observable that depends on finite redshift differences of the spin-weighted angular moments of the two point function of the three dimensional cosmic shear and on luminosity distance. It is shown that precise measurements of…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure is an invaluable cosmological tool given that most of the energy density of the concordance cosmology is invisible. Several large ground-based imaging surveys will attempt to measure this effect over…
We propose to use a simple observable, the fractional area of "hot spots" in weak lensing mass maps which are detected with high significance, to determine background cosmological parameters. Because these high-shear regions are directly…
Cosmic shear probes the distribution of dark matter via gravitational lensing of distant, background galaxies. We describe our cosmic shear survey consisting of deep blank fields observed with the Keck II telescope. We have found biases in…
The phenomenon of cosmic shear, or distortion of images of distant sources unaccompanied by magnification, is an effective way of probing the content and state of the foreground Universe, because light rays do not have to pass through mass…
Only galaxies bright enough and large enough to be unambiguously identified and measured are included in galaxy surveys used to estimate cosmic shear. We demonstrate that because gravitational lensing can scatter galaxies across the…
Cosmic shear leads to a correlation of the observed ellipticities of galaxies, an effect which is used to place constraints on cosmological parameters, and to explore the evolution of dark matter and dark energy in the universe. However, a…
Due to its location and climate, Antarctica offers unique conditions for long-period observations across a broad wavelength regime, where important diagnostic lines for molecules and ions can be found, that are essential to understand the…
The unprecedented amount and the excellent quality of lensing data that the upcoming ground- and space-based surveys will produce represent a great opportunity to shed light on the questions that still remain unanswered concerning our…
A light scalar field, minimally or not-minimally coupled to the metric field, is a well-defined candidate for the dark energy, overcoming the coincidence problem intrinsic to the cosmological constant and avoiding the difficulties of…
We present a three dimensional cosmic shear analysis of the Hubble Space Telescope COSMOS survey, the largest ever optical imaging program performed in space. We have measured the shapes of galaxies for the tell-tale distortions caused by…