Related papers: Arc Statistics
It has been recognized that the arc statistics of gravitational lensing is a useful probe of the density profile of clusters of galaxies. We examine several systematic effects which are important in predicting the number of arcs, with…
Gravitational lensing is the phenomenon arising when light rays are deflected by the mass between the source and the observer. Largely magnified and highly distorted images of background galaxies are formed by these angular deflections if…
Clusters of galaxies are the most recently assembled, massive, bound structures in the Universe. As predicted by General Relativity, given their masses, clusters strongly deform space-time in their vicinity. Clusters act as some of the most…
The nature of the dark sector of the Universe remains one of the outstanding problems in modern cosmology, with the search for new observational probes guiding the development of the next generation of observational facilities. Clues come…
The statistics of strongly lensed arcs in samples of galaxy clusters provide information on cluster structure that is complementary to that from individual clusters. However, samples of clusters that have been analyzed to date have been…
Galaxy-scale strong lensing is a powerful tool in Astrophysics and Cosmology, enabling studies of massive galaxies' internal structure, their formation and evolution, stellar initial mass function, and cosmological parameters. In this…
Many recent studies have demonstrated that scaling arguments, such as the so-called hierarchical {\em ansatz}, are extremely useful in understanding the statistical properties of weak gravitational lensing. This is especially true on small…
A long-standing problem of strong lensing by galaxy clusters regards the observed high rate of giant gravitational arcs as compared to the predictions in the framework of the "standard" cosmological model. Recently, few other…
Modern astronomy has been rapidly increasing our ability to see deeper into the universe, acquiring enormous samples of cosmic populations. Gaining astrophysical insights from these datasets requires a wide range of sophisticated…
We present the results of a set of numerical simulations evaluating the effect of cluster galaxies on arc statistics. We perform a first set of gravitational lensing simulations using three independent projections for each of nine different…
Clusters of galaxies have a huge mass which can act as gravitational lenses. Galaxies behind clusters can be distorted to form arcs in images by the lenses. Herein a search was done for giant lensed arcs by galaxy clusters using the SDSS…
We present the results of a systematic search for gravitationally-lensed arcs in clusters of galaxies located in the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 data archive. By carefully examining the images of 128 clusters we…
Strong gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters is a fundamental tool to study dark matter and constrain the geometry of the Universe. Recently, the Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields programme has allowed a significant improvement of…
Strong lensing is a powerful tool to address three major astrophysical issues: understanding the spatial distribution of mass at kpc and sub-kpc scale, where baryons and dark matter interact to shape galaxies as we see them; determining the…
Measurement of the gravitational distortion of images of distant galaxies is rapidly becoming established as a powerful probe of the dark mass distribution in clusters of galaxies. With the advent of large mosaics of CCD's these methods…
The determination of galaxy cluster mass is of great importance since it is directly linked to the well- known problem of dark matter in the Universe and to the cluster baryon content. X-ray observations from satellites have enabled a…
We calculate the expected number of gravitationally lensed optical, radio and sub-mm lensed sources on the whole sky due to foreground galaxy clusters for different cosmological models. We improve previous calculations of lensed arc…
The strong galaxy-galaxy lensing produces highly magnified and distorted images of background galaxies in the form of arcs and Einstein rings. Statistically, these effects are quantified, for example, in the number counts of highly luminous…
We examine whether a cosmologically significant distribution of dark galaxy group or cluster-sized objects can have an optical depth for multiple imaging of distant background sources which is comparable to that from known galaxies while at…
The identification of strong gravitational lenses in large surveys has historically been a rather time consuming exercise. Early data from the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (Herschel-ATLAS) demonstrate that lenses can…