Related papers: Using quasars as standard clocks for measuring cos…
With the next generation of big telescopes such as the ELT and SKA it might become possible to measure changes in the expansion rate of the Universe in real time by measuring the change of the redshifts of a large number of galaxies over a…
In recent years the possibility of measuring the temporal change of radial and transverse position of sources in the sky in real time have become conceivable thanks to the thoroughly improved technique applied to new astrometric and…
The performance of optical clocks has strongly progressed in recent years, and accuracies and instabilities of 1 part in 10^18 are expected in the near future. The operation of optical clocks in space provides new scientific and…
In this paper, we present a cosmological model-independent test for the cosmic opacity at high redshifts ($z\sim5$). We achieve this with the opacity-dependent luminosity distances derived from nonlinear relation between X-ray and UV…
Discrete Fourier analysis on the quasar number count, as a function of redshift, $z$, calculated from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR6 release appears to indicate that quasars have preferred periodic redshifts with redshift intervals of…
Several recent observations using standard rulers and standard candles now suggest, either individually or in combination, that the Universe is close to flat, i.e. that the curvature radius is about as large as the horizon radius (\sim…
Quasars (QSOs) are extremely luminous active galatic nuclei currently observed up to redshift $z=7.642$. As such, they have the potential to be the next rung of the cosmic distance ladder beyond SNe Ia, if they can reliably be used as…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has obtained images in five broad-band colors for several hundred square degrees. We present color-color diagrams for stellar objects, and demonstrate that quasars are easily distinguished from stars by their…
It is known since 1968 that the interaction of a pulse of light with matter redshifts the spectrum; the theory is clarified, to obtain the conditions for which, with incoherent light, one gets a redshift similar to a Doppler shift rather…
High precision astrometry now enables to measure the time drift of astrophysical observables in real time, hence providing new ways to probe different cosmological models. This article presents a general derivation of the redshift and…
A tight non-linear relation between the X-ray and the optical-ultraviolet (UV) emission has been observed in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) over a wide range of redshift and several orders of magnitude in luminosity, suggesting the existence…
Previous work on the quasar mass-luminosity plane indicates the possibility that quasars of the same central black hole mass might follow a common evolutionary track, independent of the properties of the host galaxy. We consider two simple…
The luminosity function for quasars (QSOs) is usually fitted by a Schechter function. The dependence of the number of quasars on the redshift, both in the low and high luminosity regions, requires the inclusion of a lower and upper boundary…
Astronomers measure cosmic distances to objects beyond our own galaxy using standard candles: objects of known intrinsic brightness, whose apparent brightnesses in the sky are then taken as an indication of their distances from the…
Cosmic shear is a key probe of modern cosmology. Amongst its challenges are shape noise and intrinsic alignments, both due to our ignorance of the unlensed shape of the source galaxies. I argue here that Einstein rings may be used as…
We present a novel method for the optimal selection of quasars using time-series observations in a single photometric bandpass. Utilizing the damped random walk model of Kelly et al. (2009), we parameterize the ensemble quasar structure…
We investigate the luminosity and redshift dependence of the quasar continuum by means of composite spectrum using a large non-BAL radio-quiet quasar sample drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Quasar continuum slopes in the UV-Opt band…
Microvariability consists in small time scale variations of low amplitude in the photometric light curves of quasars, and represents an important tool to investigate their inner core. Detection of quasar microvariations is challenging for…
Einstein's theory of general relativity states that clocks at different gravitational potentials tick at different rates - an effect known as the gravitational redshift. As fundamental probes of space and time, atomic clocks have long…
With the many ambitious proposals afoot for new generations of very large telescopes, along with spectrographs of unprecedented resolution, there arises the real possibility that the time evolution of the cosmological redshift may, in the…