Related papers: Testing Fundamental Particle Physics with the Gala…

The morphological dependence of the luminosity function is studied using a sample containing approximately 1500 bright galaxies classified into Hubble types by visual inspections for a homogeneous sample obtained from the Sloan Digital Sky…

We examine the luminosity function of white dwarfs (WDs) in the local ``complete'' WD sample ($d<20$ pc) of Holberg et. al. 2008. We find that the fraction of bright and young WDs is anomalously high among the WDs detected in multiple…

Dark energy may be the first sign of new fundamental physics in the Universe, taking either a physical form or revealing a correction to Einsteinian gravity. Weak gravitational lensing and galaxy peculiar velocities provide complementary…

Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Early Data Release and SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey scans of POSS-I plates we identify a sample of 2600 subdwarfs using reduced proper motion methods and strict selection criteria. This forms one of…

White dwarf stars are the most common endpoint of stellar evolution. Therefore, these old, numerous and compact objects provide valuable information on the late stages of stellar evolution, the physics of dense plasma and the structure and…

White dwarf WD 1145+017 is orbited by several clouds of dust, possibly emanating from actively disintegrating bodies. These dust clouds reveal themselves through deep, broad, and evolving transits in the star's light curve. Here, we report…

White dwarf atmospheres are subjected to gravitational potentials around $10^5$ times larger than occur on Earth. They provide a unique environment in which to search for any possible variation in fundamental physics in the presence of…

Laser-Induced Fluorescence (LIF) spectroscopy is an essential tool for probing ion and atom velocity distribution functions (VDFs) in complex plasmas. VDFs carry information about kinetic properties of the species critical for plasma…

In this thesis, we investigate various possibilities of Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter (DM) and their implications. These possibilities are important because they challenge the viability of WIMP DM in light of tight…

We present a detailed spectroscopic and photometric analysis of 219 DA and DB white dwarfs for which trigonometric parallax measurements are available. Our aim is to compare the physical parameters derived from the spectroscopic and…

In recent years a number of white dwarfs has been observed with very high surface magnetic fields. We can expect that the magnetic field in the core of these stars would be much higher (~ 10^{14} G). In this paper, we analytically study the…

We report our search for the cool white dwarfs belonging to the Galactic disk by extending the NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey. Narrow-band DDO51 photometry of the Deep Wide-Field Survey's northern field was obtained using the 4m-Mayall…

Little is known about the incidence of magnetic fields among the coolest white dwarfs. Their spectra usually do not exhibit any absorption lines as the bound-bound opacities of hydrogen and helium are vanishingly small. Probing these stars…

The radio luminosity functions (RLFs) of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are traditionally measured based on total emission, which doesn't reflect the current activity of the central black hole. The increasing interest in compact radio cores…

We have determined the composite luminosity function (LF) for galaxies in 60 clusters from the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey. The LF spans the range $-22.5<M_{b_{\rm J}}<-15$, and is well-fitted by a Schechter function with ${M_{b_{\rm…

The number density of small dark matter (DM) halos hosting faint high-redshift galaxies is sensitive to the DM free-streaming properties. However, constraining these DM properties is complicated by degeneracies with the uncertain baryonic…

Two recent luminosity function (LF) for galaxies are reviewed and the parameters which characterize the near infrared are fixed. A first LF is a modified Schechter LF with four parameters. The second LF is derived from the generalized gamma…

We present a near-infrared photometric search for unresolved substellar companions and debris disks around white dwarfs in the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey Large Area Survey. We cross-correlate the SDSS DR4 and McCook & Sion catalogues of…

Magnetic fields are present in roughly 10% of white dwarfs. These fields affect the structure and evolution of such stars, and may provide clues about their earlier evolution history. Particularly important for statistical studies is the…

Leveraging the large sample size of low-resolution spectroscopic surveys to constrain white dwarf stellar structure requires an accurate understanding of the shapes of hydrogen absorption lines, which are pressure broadened by the Stark…