Related papers: (Mis-)Interpreting supernovae observations in a lu…
By radiation transfer models with a realistic power spectra of the projected density distributions, we show that the optical properties of grains are poorly constrained by observations of reflection nebulae. The ISM is known to be…
Gravitationally lensed Type Ia supernovae are an emerging probe with great potential for constraining dark energy, spatial curvature, and the Hubble constant. The multiple images and their time delayed and magnified fluxes may be…
Light propagation in cosmology is usually studied in the geometrical optics approximation which requires the spacetime curvature to be much smaller than the light wavenumber. However, for non-fuzzy particle dark matter the curvature is…
Surveys with submillimetre telescopes are revealing large numbers of gravitationally lensed high-redshift sources. I describe how, in practice, these lensed systems could be simultaneously used to estimate the values of cosmological…
Quasars provide our farthest-reaching view of the Universe. The Sloan Survey now contains over 100,000 quasar candidates. A careful look at the angular distribution of quasar spectra shows a surprising "bullseye" pattern on the sky toward…
We analytically study the linear propagation of arbitrarily shaped light-pulses through an absorbing medium with a narrow transparency-window or through a resonant amplifying medium. We point out that, under certain general conditions, the…
The one-point probability distribution function (PDF) of the matter density field in the universe is a fundamental property that plays an essential role in cosmology for estimates such as gravitational weak lensing, non-linear clustering,…
We show that peculiar velocities of Type Ia supernovae can be used to derive constraints on the sum of neutrino masses, $\Sigma m_{\nu}$, and dark energy equation of state, $w = w_0+w_a(1-a)$, from measurements of the magnitude-redshift…
We present the results of weak gravitational lensing statistics in four different cosmological $N$-body simulations. The data has been generated using an algorithm for the three-dimensional shear, which makes use of a variable softening…
(Abridged) Precision cosmology with Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) makes use of the fact that SN Ia luminosities depend on their light-curve shapes and colours. Using Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) and other data, we show that there is an…
The fitting of the observed redshifts and magnitudes of type Ia supernovae to what we would see in homogeneous cosmological models has led to constraints on cosmological parameters. However, in doing such fits it is assumed that the sampled…
The coming era of large photometric wide-field surveys will increase the detection rate of supernovae by orders of magnitude. Such numbers will restrict spectroscopic follow-up in the vast majority of cases, and hence new methods based…
Weak-scale supersymmetry is one of the most favoured theories beyond the Standard Model of particle physics that elegantly solves various theoretical and observational problems in both particle physics and cosmology. In this thesis, I…
The effect of metallicity on the observed light of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) could lead to systematic errors as the absolute magnitudes of local and distant SNe Ia are compared to measure luminosity distances and determine cosmological…
We review some results of the past 12 years derived from optical and infrared photometry of Type Ia supernovae. A combination of optical and infrared photometry allows us to determine accurately the extinction along the line of sight. The…
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…
Observed data is often contaminated by undiscovered interlopers, leading to biased parameter estimation. Here we present BEAMS (Bayesian Estimation Applied to Multiple Species) which significantly improves on the standard maximum likelihood…
The selective light absorption in space has been raised in astronomical literature. The substance producing the absorption must have some mass; thus the question is how large it is. We develop a dynamical model of the Milky Way system,…
It has been suggested that multiple scattering on circumstellar dust could explain the non-standard reddening observed in the line-of-sight to Type Ia supernovae. In this work we use Monte Carlo simulations to examine how the scattered…
One way of recovering information about the initial conditions of the Universe is by measuring features of the cosmological density field which are preserved during gravitational evolution and galaxy formation. In this paper we study the…