Related papers: Testing Gravity with the Stacked Phase Space aroun…
Ongoing and planned wide-area surveys at optical and infrared wavelengths should detect a few times 10^5 galaxy clusters, roughly 10% of which are expected to be at redshifts >~ 0.8. We investigate what can be learned about the X-ray…
The gravitational redshift effect allows one to directly probe the gravitational potential in clusters of galaxies. Following up on Wojtak et al. [Nature (London) 477, 567 (2011)], we present a new measurement. We take advantage of new data…
The motions of galaxies can be used to constrain the cosmological density parameter Omega and the clustering amplitude of matter on large scales. The mean relative velocity of galaxy pairs, estimated from the Mark III survey, indicates that…
To test whether clusters have rising mass to light ratios at large radii and to estimate the amplitude of the density fluctuation spectrum on the scale of 10\hmpc\ the Canadian Network for Observational Cosmology (CNOC) cluster…
The large-scale structure in the distribution of galaxies is thought to arise from the gravitational instability of small fluctuations in the initial density field of the universe. A key test of this hypothesis is that superclusters of…
Typical stars in the Milky Way galaxy have velocities of hundreds of kilometres per second and experience gravitational accelerations of $\sim 10^{-10}$ m s$^{-2}$, resulting in velocity changes of a few centimetres per second over a…
A promising method for measuring the cosmological parameter combination fsigma_8 is to compare observed peculiar velocities with peculiar velocities predicted from a galaxy density field using perturbation theory. We use N-body simulations…
We compute the bispectrum of the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) and use it to measure the bias parameter of the galaxies. This parameter quantifies the strength of clustering of the galaxies relative to the mass in the Universe. By…
A standard method to study the mass distribution in galaxy clusters is through strong lensing of background galaxies in which the positions of multiple images of the same source constrain the surface mass distribution of the cluster.…
Gravitational lensing can provide pure geometric tests of the structure of space-time, for instance by determining empirically the angular diameter distance-redshift relation. This geometric test has been demonstrated several times using…
The number density and correlation function of galaxies are two key quantities to characterize the distribution of the observed galaxy population. High-$z$ spectroscopic surveys, which usually involve complex target selection and are…
Future weak lensing surveys will directly probe the density fluctuation in the universe. Recent studies have shown how the statistics of the weak lensing convergence field is related to the statistics of collapsed objects. Extending earlier…
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 study the cosmic peculiar velocity field as traced by a sample of 1184 spiral, elliptical and S0 galaxies, grouped in 704 objects. We carry out a statistical analysis, by calculating bulk flows and velocity correlation functions for this…
The recent measurement of the gravitational redshifts of galaxies in galaxy clusters by Wojtak et al. has opened a new observational window on dark matter and modified gravity. By stacking clusters this determination effectively used the…
We present a general relativistic description of galaxy clustering in a FLRW universe. The observed redshift and position of galaxies are affected by the matter fluctuations and the gravity waves between the source galaxies and the…
Galaxy redshift surveys are one of the pillars of the current standard cosmological model and remain a key tool in the experimental effort to understand the origin of cosmic acceleration. To this end, the next generation of surveys aim at…
We investigate the skewness of galaxy number density fluctuations as a possible probe to test gravity theories. We find that the specific linear combination of the skewness parameters corresponds to the coefficients of the second-order…
We propose a new approach for measuring the mass profile and shape of groups and clusters of galaxies, which uses lensing magnification of distant background galaxies. The main advantage of lensing magnification is that, unlike lensing…
Modifications of general relativity provide an alternative explanation to dark energy for the observed acceleration of the universe. We review recent developments in modified gravity theories, focusing on higher dimensional approaches and…