Related papers: Dark matter under the microscope: Constraining com…
When gravitational waves pass through the nuclear star clusters of galactic lenses, they may be microlensed by the stars. Such microlensing can cause potentially observable beating patterns on the waveform due to waveform superposition and…
Merging galaxy clusters present a unique opportunity to study the properties of dark matter in an astrophysical context. These are rare and extreme cosmic events in which the bulk of the baryonic matter becomes displaced from the dark…
Lensing flux-ratio anomalies have been frequently observed and taken as evidence for the presence of abundant dark matter substructures in lensing galaxies, as predicted by the cold dark matter (CDM) model of cosmogony. In previous work, we…
A new method for measuring gravitational lensing with high redshift type Ia supernovae is investigated. The method utilizes correlations between foreground galaxies and supernova brightnesses to substantially reduce possible systematic…
Strong lensing studies can provide detailed mass maps of the inner regions even in dynamically active galaxy clusters. It is shown that proper modelling of the intracluster medium, i.e. the main baryonic component, can play an important…
We present a comprehensive mass reconstruction of the rich galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17 at z~0.4 from ACS data, unifying both strong- and weak-lensing constraints. The weak-lensing signal from a dense distribution of background galaxies (~120…
This is the first in a series of papers on the weak lensing effect caused by clusters of galaxies in Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The photometrically selected cluster sample, known as MaxBCG, includes ~130,000 objects between redshift 0.1 and…
Clusters of galaxies are the most recently assembled, massive, bound structures in the Universe. As predicted by General Relativity, given their masses, clusters strongly deform space-time in their vicinity. Clusters act as some of the most…
Strong gravitational lensing is a promising way of uncovering the nature of dark matter, by finding perturbations to images that cannot be well accounted for by modeling the lens galaxy without additional structure, be it subhalos (smaller…
We identify the largest known lensed images of a single spiral galaxy, lying close to the centre of the distant cluster MACS J1149.5+2223 ($z=0.544$). These images cover a total area of $\simeq 150 \Box\arcsec$ and are magnified $\simeq…
In the CDM scenario, dark matter halos are assembled hierarchically from smaller subunits. A long-standing problem with this picture is that the number of sub-halos predicted by CDM simulations is orders of magnitudes higher than the known…
Microlensing of stars places significant constraints on sub-planetary-mass compact objects, including primordial black holes, as dark matter candidates. As the lens' Einstein radius in the source plane becomes comparable to the size of the…
We present a statistical analysis of a sample of 20 strong lensing clusters drawn from the Local Cluster Substructure Survey (LoCuSS), based on high resolution Hubble Space Telescope imaging of the cluster cores and follow-up spectroscopic…
Multiply-imaged quasar lenses can be used to constrain the substructure mass fraction in galaxy-sized dark matter halos via anomalous flux ratios in lensed images. The flux ratios, however, can be affected by both the substructure in the…
We present the clustering of galaxy clusters as a useful addition to the common set of cosmological observables. The clustering of clusters probes the large-scale structure of the Universe, extending galaxy clustering analysis to the…
We describe a few recent microlensing results from the MACHO Collaboration. The aim of the MACHO Project was the identification and quantitative description of dark and luminous matter in the Milky Way using microlensing toward the…
We investigate the feasibility of extracting the gravitational nanolensing signal due to the presence of subsolar mass halos within galaxy-sized dark matter halos. We show that subsolar mass halos in a lensing galaxy can cause strong…
Gravitational lensing allows us to probe the structure of matter on a broad range of astronomical scales, and as light from a distant source traverses an intervening galaxy, compact matter such as planets, stars, and black holes act as…
Substructure in distant gravitational lens galaxies can be detected because it alters the brightnesses and shapes of the lensed images. The optical and radio flux ratios in the four-image lens B1422+231 imply that there is a \sim 10^4-10^7…
The recently reported microlensing events of the LMC have caused much excitement, and have been interpreted as due to `dark objects' (MACHOs) in the halo of our Galaxy. It is shown here that the stars within the LMC play a dominant role as…