Related papers: The Ellipticity Distribution of Ambiguously Blende…
We report a detection of the coherent distortion of faint galaxies arising from gravitational lensing by foreground structures. This ``cosmic shear'' is potentially the most direct measure of the mass power spectrum, as it is unaffected by…
The excess numbers of blue galaxies at faint magnitudes is a subject of much controversy. Recent Hubble Space Telescope results has revealed a plethora of galaxies with peculiar morphologies tentatively identified as the evolving…
Weak lensing experiments are a powerful probe of cosmology through their measurement of the mass distribution of the universe. A challenge for this technique is to control systematic errors that occur when measuring the shapes of distant…
Accurate shape measurements are essential to infer cosmological parameters from large area weak gravitational lensing studies. The compact diffraction-limited point-spread function (PSF) in space-based observations is greatly beneficial,…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure is a powerful probe of cosmology if the apparent alignments in the shapes of distant galaxies can be accurately measured. Most studies have therefore focused on improving the fidelity of the shape…
The images provided by the Advanced Camera for Surveys at the Hubble Space Telescope (ACS/HST) have the amazing spacial resolution of 0".05/pixel. Therefore, it is possible to resolve individual stars in nearby galaxies and, in particular,…
In weak gravitational lensing, weighted quadrupole moments of the brightness profile in galaxy images are a common way to estimate gravitational shear. We employ general adaptive moments (GLAM) to study causes of shear bias on a fundamental…
Intrinsic galaxy alignments constitute the major astrophysical systematic of forthcoming weak gravitational lensing surveys but also yield unique insights into galaxy formation and evolution. We build analytic models for the distribution of…
We introduce a new method for constraining the redshift distribution of a set of galaxies, using weak gravitational lensing shear. Instead of using observed shears and redshifts to constrain cosmological parameters, we ask how well the…
The most important uncertainty in the results of gravitational microlensing experiments comes from the difficulties of photometry caused by blending of source stars. Recently Nemiroff (1997) pointed out that the results of microlensing…
We calculate the expected lensing statistics of the galaxy population in large, low-redshift surveys. Galaxies are modeled using realistic, multiple components: a dark matter halo, a bulge component and disc. We use semi-analytic models of…
We present results from two mid-infrared imaging programs of ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) and fine-structure elliptical galaxies. The former are known to nearly all be recent mergers between two gas-rich spiral galaxies, while…
Assembly bias is the variation in the clustering of dark matter halos and galaxies that arises from correlations between the halo assembly history and the large-scale environment at fixed halo mass. In this work, we use the cosmological…
The morphological properties of galaxies between $21 {\rm~mag} < I < 25 {\rm~mag}$ in the {\em Hubble Deep Field} are investigated using a quantitative classification system based on measurements of the central concentration and asymmetry…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure allows a direct measure of the dark matter distribution. We have used parallel images taken with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) on the Hubble Space Telescope to measure weak lensing, or…
We report the serendipitous discovery of ``Einstein cross'' gravitational lens candidates using the Hubble Space Telescope. We have so far discovered two good examples of such lenses, each in the form of four faint blue images located in a…
Weak gravitational lensing by large scale structure affects the number counts of faint galaxies through the ``magnification bias'' and thus affects the measurement of the angular two-point correlation function $\w $. At faint magnitudes the…
We have analysed ~24 square degrees of R_C-band imaging data from the Red-Sequence Cluster Survey (RCS), and measured the excess correlations between galaxy ellipticities on scales ranging from 1 to 30 arcminutes. We have used data from two…
We have worked out simple analytical formulae that accurately approximate the relationship between the position of the source with respect to the lens center and the amplification of the images, hence the lens cross section, for realistic…
Metacalibration is a new technique for measuring weak gravitational lensing shear that is unbiased for isolated galaxy images. In this work we test metacalibration with overlapping, or ``blended'' galaxy images. Using standard…