Related papers: Measuring Lensing Magnification of Quasars by Larg…
The gravitational field of a galaxy can act as a lens and deflect the light emitted by a more distant object such as a quasar. Strong gravitational lensing causes multiple images of the same quasar to appear in the sky. Since the light in…
Strong gravitational lensing distorts our view of sources at cosmological distances but brings invaluable constraints on the mass content of foreground objects and on the geometry and properties of the Universe. We report the detection of a…
To use strong gravitational lenses as an astrophysical or cosmological probe, models of their mass distributions are often needed. We present a new, time-efficient automation code for uniform modeling of strongly lensed quasars with GLEE, a…
It is accepted that quasars are powered by supermassive black holes (SMBH) with masses in the range 10^6 - 10^9 solar masses in their cores. Occasionally, compact stars can plunge into SMBH. In addition, there may be a number of such…
We study the dependence of the number density and properties of quasars on the background galaxy density using the currently largest spectroscopic datasets of quasars and galaxies. We construct a galaxy number density field smoothed over…
We use weak lensing shear measurements of six z>0.5 clusters of galaxies to derive the mean lensing redshift of the background galaxies used to measure the shear. Five of these clusters are compared to X-ray mass models and verify a mean…
We present the results of the first long-term (2.2 years) spectroscopic monitoring of a gravitationally lensed quasar, namely the Einstein Cross Q2237+0305. The goal of this paper is to present the observational facts to be compared in…
(Abridged) Weak gravitational lensing induces distortions on the images of background galaxies, and thus provides a direct measure of mass fluctuations in the universe. Since the distortions induced by lensing on the images of background…
It is well known that magnification bias, the modulation of galaxy or quasar source counts by gravitational lensing, can change the observed angular correlation function. We investigate magnification-induced changes to the shape of the…
Accelerating expansion of the Universe is a great challenge for both physics and cosmology. In light of lacking the convincing theoretical explanation, an effective description of this phenomenon in terms of cosmic equation of state turns…
CMB lensing is a promising, novel way to measure galaxy cluster masses that can be used, e.g., for mass calibration in galaxy cluster counts analyses. Understanding the statistics of the galaxy cluster mass observable obtained with such…
A new method for measuring gravitational lensing with high redshift type Ia supernovae is investigated. The method utilizes correlations between foreground galaxies and supernova brightnesses to substantially reduce possible systematic…
Wide-separation lensed QSOs measure the mass function and evolution of massive galaxy clusters, in a similar way to the cluster mass function deduced from X-ray-selected samples or statistical measurements of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect.…
The first investigations of the response of the microlensing magnification pattern (at an optical depth of order unity) to the mass function of the microlenses found that the resulting statistics depend only on the mean microlens mass <m>.…
Gravitational lensing magnification is measured with a significance of 9.7 sigma on a large sample of galaxy clusters in the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS). This survey covers ~154 deg^2 and contains over 18,000…
If the unexpectedly high frequency of quasar pairs with very different component redshifts is due to the lensing of a population of background quasars by the foreground quasar, typical lens masses must be $\sim10^{12}M_{\sun}$ and the sum…
Weak gravitational lensing by large scale structure affects the number counts of faint galaxies through the ``magnification bias'' and thus affects the measurement of the angular two-point correlation function $\w $. At faint magnitudes the…
Lensing magnification and stacked shear measurements of galaxy clusters rely on measuring the density of background galaxies behind the clusters. The most common ways of measuring this quantity ignore the fact that some fraction of the sky…
Gravitational microlensing has proven to be a powerful tool in the study of quasars, providing some of the strongest limits on the scales of structure in the central engine. Typically sources are considered to be smoothly varying on some…
We try to explain quasar-galaxy associations by gravitational lensing by globular clusters, located in the halos of foreground galaxies. We propose observational test for verification of this hypothesis. We processed SUPERCOSMOS sky survey…