Related papers: Dynamical Modeling of NGC 6809: Selecting the best…
Galaxy clusters are a promising probe of late-time structure growth, but constraints on cosmology from cluster abundances are currently limited by systematics in their inferred masses. One unmitigated systematic effect in weak-lensing mass…
The widely accepted dark matter hypothesis offers a seductive solution to missing mass problems (galaxies, clusters of galaxies, gravitational collapse in structure formation,...). However the physical nature of the Dark Matter itself is…
This paper presents a study of the large-sample behavior of the posterior distribution of a structural parameter which is partially identified by moment inequalities. The posterior density is derived based on the limited information…
Bayesian model selection is a tool to decide whether the introduction of a new parameter is warranted by data. I argue that the usual sampling statistic significance tests for a null hypothesis can be misleading, since they do not take into…
We used a combination of Hubble Space Telescope and ground based data to probe the dynamical state of the low mass Galactic globular cluster NGC 6101. We have re-derived the structural parameters of the cluster by using star counts and we…
Recent studies of nearby globular clusters have discovered excess dark mass in their cores, apparently in an extended distribution, and simulations indicate that this mass is composed mostly of white dwarfs (respectively stellar-mass black…
We describe the status of a project whose main goal is to detect variability along the extreme horizontal branch of the globular cluster NGC 6752. Based on Magellan 6.5m data, preliminary light curves are presented for some candidate…
We present a study on the coherent rotation of the intracluster medium and dark matter components of simulated galaxy clusters extracted from a volume-limited sample of the MUSIC project. The set is re-simulated with three different recipes…
Using high-resolution non-radiative hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy clusters we obtain simple analytic formulae for DM and gas distribution in the spherical approximation. We derive fits for the DM density, velocity dispersion and…
Model selection aims to determine which theoretical models are most plausible given some data, without necessarily asking about the preferred values of the model parameters. A common model selection question is to ask when new data require…
We present new dynamical models of the S0 galaxy N3115, making use of the available published photometry and kinematics as well as of two-dimensional TIGER spectrography. We first examined the kinematics in the central 40 arcsec in the…
There exist isolated elliptical galaxies, whose dynamics can be modelled without resorting to dark matter or MOND, e.g. NGC 7507. The isolated elliptical NGC 5812 is another object to investigate a possible role of isolation. We use…
Rich and massive clusters of galaxies at intermediate redshift are capable of magnifying and distorting the images of background galaxies. A comparison of different mass estimators among these clusters can provide useful information about…
We investigate the dark matter density profile of the massive elliptical galaxy, NGC 1407, by constructing spherically symmetric Jeans models of its field star and globular cluster systems. Two major challenges in such models are the…
Evaluation of gravitational theories by means of cosmological data suffers from the fact that galaxies are biased tracers of dark matter. Current bias models focus primarily on high-density regions, whereas low-density regions carry…
The majority of observed mass-to-light ratios of globular clusters are too low to be explained by `canonical' cluster models, in which dynamical effects are not accounted for. Moreover, these models do not reproduce a recently reported…
We present an improved data-reduction technique to obtain high-precision proper motions (PMs) of globular clusters using Hubble Space Telescope data. The new reduction is superior to the one presented in the first paper of this series for…
Observations of internal motions in globular clusters offer unique insights into the dynamics of the clusters. We have recently developed methods of high-precision astrometry with HST's WFPC2 camera, which allow us to measure internal…
We develop a Bayesian model for globular clusters composed of multiple stellar populations, extending earlier statistical models for open clusters composed of simple (single) stellar populations (vanDyk et al. 2009, Stein et al. 2013).…
The motion of the baryonic components of the Milky Way is governed by both luminous and dark matter content of the Galaxy. Thus, the dynamics of the Milky Way globular clusters can be used as tracers to infer the mass model of the Galaxy up…