Related papers: Testing the tidal alignment model of galaxy intrin…
If the orientations of galaxies are correlated with large-scale structure, then anisotropic selection effects such as preferential selection of face-on disc galaxies can contaminate large scale structure observables. Here we consider the…
The magnification bias of large-scale structures, combined with galaxy biasing, leads to a cross-correlation of distant quasars with foreground galaxies on angular scales of the order of arc minutes and larger. The amplitude and angular…
An asymmetry index is derived from ellipse-fitting to galaxy images, that gives weight to faint outer features and is not strongly redshift-dependent. These measures are made on a sample of 13 2MASS QSOs and their neighbour galaxies, and a…
Mergers and tidal interactions between massive galaxies and their dwarf satellites are a fundamental prediction of the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter cosmology. These events are thought to provide important observational diagnostics of nonlinear…
(Abriged) We present analytic models for the formation and evolution of tidal tails and related structures following impulsive disturbances in galaxy collisions. Since the epicyclic approximation is not valid for large radial excursions, we…
Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey we study correlations between directions of galaxy angular momenta determined from images of spiral galaxies and various observables derived from the reconstructed initial conditions. We find an…
Galaxy intrinsic alignments (IA) are a critical uncertainty for current and future weak lensing measurements. We describe a perturbative expansion of IA, analogous to the treatment of galaxy biasing. From an astrophysical perspective, this…
We present a theoretical study of galaxy spin correlation statistics, with detailed technical derivations. We also find an expression for the spin-density cross-correlation, and apply that to the Tully galaxy catalog. The observational…
The intrinsic scatter in the ellipticities of galaxies about the mean shape, known as "shape noise," is the most important source of noise in weak lensing shear measurements. Several approaches to reducing shape noise have recently been put…
The correlation between the spins of dark matter halos and the large-scale structure (LSS) has been studied in great detail over a large redshift range, while investigations of galaxies are still incomplete. Motivated by this point, we use…
How elliptical galaxies form is a key question in observational cosmology. While the formation of massive ellipticals is strongly linked to mergers, the low mass (Mstar < 10^9.5 MSun) regime remains less well explored. In particular,…
We measure seeing-corrected ellipticities for 2 x 10^6 galaxies with magnitude R<23 in 12 widely separated fields totalling 75 deg^2 of sky. At angular scales >30\arcmin, ellipticity correlations are detected at high significance and…
We demonstrate that the intrinsic alignment of galaxies with large-scale tidal fields sources an extra contribution to the recently-detected cross-correlation of galaxy shear and weak lensing of the microwave background. The extra term is…
Strong lensing systems, expected to be abundantly discovered by next-generation surveys, offer a powerful tool for studying cosmology and galaxy evolution. The connection between galaxy structure and cosmology through distance ratios…
We study the effects of ellipticity in lens galaxies and external tidal shear from neighboring objects on the statistics of strong gravitational lenses. For isothermal lens galaxies normalized so that the Einstein radius is independent of…
The recently discovered discrepancy between galaxy mass measurements from weak lensing and predictions from abundance matching questions our understanding of cosmology, or of the galaxy-halo connection, or of both. We re-examined this…
We investigate the alignment of galaxy and halo orientations using the TNG300-1 hydrodynamical simulation. Our analysis reveals that the distribution of the 2D misalignment angle $\theta_{\rm{2D}}$ can be well described by a truncated…
Gravitational lensing has now become a popular tool to measure the mass distribution of structures in the Universe on various scales. Here we focus on the study of galaxy's scale dark matter halos with galaxy-galaxy lensing techniques:…
Since gravitational lensing effects directly probe inhomogeneities of dark matter, lensing-galaxy cross-correlations can provide us important information on the relation between dark matter and galaxy distributions, i.e., the bias. In this…
The alignments of galaxies across the large-scale structure of the Universe are known to be a source of contamination for gravitational lensing, but they can also probe cosmology and the physics of galaxy evolution in many ways. In this…