Related papers: Aberration of starlight experiment
I suggest that measurements of intensity fluctuations caused by classical wave interactions can be used to find unresolved gravitational lenses and determine time delays of essentially arbitrary length among the images formed by a…
When light is passed through aberrated optical systems, the resulting degradation in amplitude and phase has deleterious effects, for example, on resolution in imaging, spot sizes in focussing, and the beam quality factor of the output…
We show how a property of dualism, which can exist in the entanglement of identical particles, can be tested in the usual photonic Bell measurement apparatus with minor modifications. Two different sets of coincidence measurements on the…
We present a means of characterizing and removing internal reflections between the CCD and other optical surfaces in an astronomical camera. The stellar reflections appear as out-of-focus images and are not necessarily axisymmetric about…
Observational astronomy is plagued with selection effects that must be taken into account when interpreting data from astronomical surveys. Because of the physical limitations of observing time and instrument sensitivity, datasets are…
Recent years have seen increasing efforts to directly measure some aspects of the general relativistic gravitomagnetic interaction in several astronomical scenarios in the solar system. After briefly overviewing the concept of…
We report on the first results from a large-scale observing campaign aiming to use astrometric microlensing to detect and place limits on the mass of single objects, including stellar remnants. We used the Hubble Space Telescope to monitor…
We consider a nearly free falling Earth satellite where atomic wave interferometers are tied to a telescope pointing towards a faraway star. They measure the acceleration and the rotation relatively to the local inertial frame. We calculate…
Minor bodies of the solar system can be used to measure the spectrum of the Sun as a star by observing sunlight reflected by their surfaces. To perform an accurate measurement of the radial velocity of the Sun as a star by this method, it…
Estimation of time delays from a noisy and gapped data is one of the simplest data analysis problems in astronomy by its formulation. But as history of real experiments show, the work with observed data sets can be quite complex and…
Recent studies of lensing clusters reveal that it might be fairly common for a galaxy cluster that the X-ray center has an obvious offset from its gravitational center which is measured by strong lensing. We argue that if these offsets…
High-contrast observations in optical and infrared astronomy are defined as any observation requiring a technique to reveal a celestial object of interest that is in such close angular proximity to another source brighter by a factor of at…
We consider the task of distinguishing between two different alternative models that can roughly equally explain observed time series data, mainly focusing on the period ambiguity case (aliasing). We propose a test for checking whether the…
Observations of compact objects in the electromagnetic spectrum and the detection of gravitational waves from them can lead to quantitative tests of the theory of general relativity in the strong-field regime following two very different…
(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…
A method based on optical interferences for measuring optical nonlinearities is presented. In a proof-of-principle experiment, the technique is applied to the experimental determination of the intensity dependence of the photoionization…
We report an experimental demonstration of sub-wavelength interference without correlation. Typically, people can achieve sub-wavelength effect with correlation measurement no matter by using bi-photon or thermal light sources. Here we…
The paper contains a proposed experiment for testing the gravitomagnetic effect on the propagation of light around a rotating mass. The idea is to use a rotating spherical laboratory-scale shell, around which two mutually orthogonal…
A number of different mechanisms exist which can produce vector perturbations to the metric. One might think that such perturbations could deflect light rays from distant sources, producing observable effects. Indeed, this is expected to be…
We demonstrate a new technique to search for dark compact objects. When dark matter comprising a dark compact object interacts with photons, the compact object can disperse light traveling though it. As these objects pass between Earth and…