Related papers: Digging into dark matter with weak gravitational l…
[A brief review intended for a general physics colloquium audience.] Astrophysicists now know that 80% of the matter in the universe is `dark matter', composed of neutral and weakly interacting elementary particles that are not part of the…
While the direct detection of the dark-matter particle remains very challenging, the nature of dark matter could be possibly constrained by comparing the observed abundance and properties of small-scale sub-galactic mass structures with…
Baryonic effects such as AGN feedback can significantly impact the matter clustering, are harder to model from first principles, and emerge as a severe limiting factor in weak lensing cosmology. To tackle this issue, we propose a generic…
Weak gravitational lensing of background galaxies is a unique, direct probe of the distribution of matter in clusters of galaxies. We review several important aspects of cluster weak gravitational lensing together with recent advances in…
I give a review of the development of the concept of dark matter. The dark matter story passed through several stages from a minor observational puzzle to a major challenge for theory of elementary particles. Modern data suggest that dark…
Weak gravitational lensing has become an important tool to study the properties of dark matter halos around galaxies, thanks to the advent of large panoramic cameras on 4m class telescopes. This area of research has been developing rapidly…
An ever-increasing body of evidence suggests that weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) constitute the bulk of the matter in the Universe. We illustrate how experimental data, dimensional analysis and Standard Model particle physics…
Galaxy clusters as gravitational lenses play a unique role in astrophysics and cosmology: they permit mapping the dark matter distribution on a range of scales; they reveal the properties of high and intermediate redshift background…
Gravitational lensing observations of galaxy clusters have identified dark matter ``blobs'' with remarkably low baryonic content. We use such a system to probe the particle nature of dark matter with X-ray observations. We also study high…
We consider small-scale spheroidal clusters of weakly interacting massive particles in our Galaxy as non-compact gravitational microlenses and predict the appearance of caustics in the plane of a lensed source. The crossing of these…
In the past four decades a new type of astronomy has emerged, where instead of looking up into the sky "telescopes" are buried miles underground or deep under water or ice and search not for photons (that is, light), but rather for…
The physical nature of most of the gravitating mass in the universe is completely mysterious. The astrophysical evidence for the presence of this dark matter and astrophysical constraints on its properties will be reviewed. The most popular…
Many gravitationally lensed quasars exhibit flux ratio "anomalies" that cannot be explained under the hypothesis that the lensing potential is smooth on scales smaller than one kpc. Micro-lensing by stars is a natural source of granularity…
Gravitational lensing has developed into one of the most powerful tools for the analysis of the dark universe. This review summarises the theory of gravitational lensing, its main current applications and representative results achieved so…
Dark matter has been introduced to explain mass deficits noted at different astronomical scales, in galaxies, groups of galaxies, clusters, superclusters and even across the full horizon. Dark matter makes itself felt only through its…
We discuss arguments both in favor of and against dark matter. With the repeated failure of experiment to date to detect dark matter we discuss what could be done instead, and to this end look for clues in the data themselves. We identify…
If modified gravity holds, but the weak lensing analysis is done in the standard way, one finds that dark matter halos have peculiar shapes, not following the standard Navarro-Frenk-White profiles, and are fully predictable from the…
Dark matter is estimated to make up ~84% of all normal/baryonic matter, but cannot be directly imaged. Despite the fact that dark matter cannot be directly observed yet, its influence on the motion of stars and gas in spiral galaxies have…
Results are reported from a search for a class of composite dark matter models with feeble, long-range interactions with normal matter. We search for impulses arising from passing dark matter particles by monitoring the mechanical motion of…
During the last century many observations have been made to peep into the dark matter in the universe and many astonishing behaviors of Galaxy clusters have been found which do not fit to any theories formulated before. However, Optical…