Related papers: The Lutz-Kelker Paradox
Weak lensing will play an important role in future cosmological surveys, including e.g. Euclid and SKA. Sufficiently accurate theoretical predictions are important for correctly interpreting these surveys and hence for extracting correct…
Weak gravitational lensing (WL) causes distortions of galaxy images and probes massive structures on large scales, allowing us to understand the late-time evolution of the Universe. One way to extract the cosmological information from WL is…
We present a quantitative analysis of the effect of microlensing caused by random motion of individual stars in the galaxy which is lensing a background quasar. We calculate a large number of magnification patterns for positions of the…
Combination frequencies are not solutions of the perturbed stellar structure equations. In dense power spectra from a light curve of a given multi-periodic pulsating star, they can compromise the mode identification in an asteroseismic…
We identify and study a previously unknown systematic effect on cosmic shear measurements, caused by the selection of galaxies used for shape measurement, in particular the rejection of close (blended) galaxy pairs. We use ray-tracing…
Density fluctuations in the matter distribution lead to distortions of the images of distant galaxies through weak gravitational lensing effects. This provides an efficient probe of the cosmological parameters and of the density field. In…
Gravitational microlensing is currently the only technique that helps study the Galactic distribution of planets as a function of distance from the Galactic center. The Galactic location of a lens system can be uniquely determined only when…
Several recent studies show that bright, intermediate and high redshift optically and radio selected QSOs are positively correlated with nearby galaxies on a range of angular scales up to a degree. Obscuration by unevenly distributed…
Selberg's central limit theorem states that the values of $\log|\zeta(1/2+i \tau)|$, where $\tau$ is a uniform random variable on $[T,2T]$, is distributed like a Gaussian random variable of mean $0$ and standard deviation…
Stellar population synthesis can be approached as an inverse problem. The physical information is extracted from the observations through an inverse model. The process requires the transformation of the observational errors into model…
We prove a generalized Faulhaber inequality to bound the sums of the $j$-th powers of the first $n$ (possibly shifted) natural numbers. With the help of this inequality we are able to improve the known bounds for bracketing numbers of…
We present the first results of our analyses of selected RR Lyrae stars for which data have been obtained by the Kepler Mission. As expected, we find a significant fraction of the RRab stars to show the Blazhko effect, a still unexplained…
Classical light bending is investigated for weak gravitational fields in the presence of hypothetical local Lorentz violation. Using an effective field theory framework that describes general deviations from local Lorentz invariance, we…
A method is developed for fitting theoretically predicted astronomical spectra to an observed spectrum. Using a hierarchical Bayesian principle, the method takes both systematic and statistical measurement errors into account, which has not…
Weak gravitational lensing (WL) peak statistics capture cosmic non-linear structures and can provide additional cosmological information complementary to cosmic shear two-point correlation analyses. They have been applied to different WL…
The performance of ``typical set (pairs) decoding'' for ensembles of Gallager's linear code is investigated using statistical physics. In this decoding, error happens when the information transmission is corrupted by an untypical noise or…
The availability of large datasets requires an improved view on statistical laws in complex systems, such as Zipf's law of word frequencies, the Gutenberg-Richter law of earthquake magnitudes, or scale-free degree distribution in networks.…
Stage-IV galaxy surveys will measure correlations at small cosmological scales with high signal-to-noise ratio. One of the main challenges of extracting information from small scales is devising accurate models, as well as characterizing…
When searching over a large parameter space for anomalies such as events, peaks, objects, or particles, there is a large probability that spurious signals with seemingly high significance will be found. This is known as the look-elsewhere…
We propose the use of robust, Bayesian methods for estimating extragalactic distance errors in multi-measurement catalogs. We seek to improve upon the more commonly used frequentist propagation-of-error methods, as they fail to explain both…