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Mass is a fundamental property of galaxy groups and clusters. In theory weak gravitational lensing will enable an approximately unbiased measurement of mass, but parametric methods for extracting cluster masses from data require the…
It has been suggested recently that the change in cosmological redshift (the Sandage test of expansion) could be observed in the next generation of large telescopes and ultra-stable spectrographs. In a recent paper we estimated the change…
High precision spectrographs can enable not only the discovery of exoplanets, but can also provide a fundamental measurement in Galactic dynamics. Over about ten year baselines, the expected change in the line-of-sight velocity due to the…
We present long-slit HST/STIS measurements of the ionized-gas kinematics in the nucleus of three disk galaxies, namely NGC 2179, NGC 4343, NGC 4435. The sample galaxies have been selected on the basis of their ground-based spectroscopy, for…
There are now 10 firm time delay measurements in gravitational lenses. The physics of time delays is well understood, and the only important variable for interpreting the time delays to determine H_0 is the mean surface mass density <k> (in…
The spin of galaxy clusters encodes key information about their formation, dynamics, and the influence of large-scale structure. However, whether clusters possess statistically significant spin and how to measure it observationally remain…
We have observed two blank fields of approximately 30 by 23 arcminutes using the William Herschel Telescope. The fields have been studied as part of the CNOC2 survey, and spectroscopic redshifts are available for 1125 galaxies in the two…
We present a simple mass model for the lensing galaxy in the gravitationally lensed quasar 0957+561. The model is a generalization of the singular isothermal sphere and includes a core radius, $r_c$, and a power-law index, $\eta$, defined…
We pioneer the black hole mass gap as a powerful new tool for constraining modified gravity theories. These theories predict fifth forces that alter the structure and evolution of population-III stars, exacerbating the pair-instability.…
The fraction of high-redshift sources which are multiply-imaged by intervening galaxies is strongly dependent on the cosmological constant, and so can be a useful probe of the cosmological model. However its power is limited by various…
We detect the weak gravitational lensing distortion of 450,000 background galaxies (20<R<23) by 790 foreground galaxies (R<18) selected from the Las Campanas Redshift Survey (LCRS). This is the first detection of weak lensing by field…
Flexion is the weak lensing effect responsible for the weakly skewed and arc-like appearance of lensed galaxies. The flexion signal-to-noise ratio can be an order of magnitude larger than that of shear. For the first time, we show how this…
We present a new simple functional form to model the evolution of a spherical mass distribution in a cosmological context. Two parameters control the growth of the system and this is modelled using a redshift dependent exponential for the…
A novel interpretation of MOND is presented. For galactic data, in addition to Newtonian acceleration, there is an attractive acceleration peaking at Milgrom's parameter a_0. The peak lies within experimental error where a_0 = cH_0/2\pi and…
Since the 1930s, astronomical observations have accumulated evidence that our understanding of the dynamics of galaxies and groups of galaxies is grossly incomplete: assuming the validity of Newton's law of gravity on astronomical scales,…
Practically all the full-fledged MOND theories propounded to date are of the modified-gravity (MG) type: they modify only the Newtonian, Poisson action of the gravitational potential, or the general-relativistic Einstein-Hilbert action,…
A wealth of recent studies have shown that the LMC is likely massive, with a halo mass $>10^{11} M_\odot$. One consequence of having such a nearby and massive neighbour is that the inner Milky Way is expected to be accelerated with respect…
The observed cosmic acceleration today could be due to an unknown energy component (dark energy), or a modification to general relativity (modified gravity). If dark energy models and modified gravity models are required to predict the same…
We present a new set of galaxy scaling relations for the relative mass content of atomic gas, molecular gas and stars. Such relations are driven by disc gravitational instability, and originate from the low galaxy-to-galaxy variance of…
Recently a new -quantum motivated- theory of gravity has been proposed that modifies the standard Newtonian potential at large distances when spherical symmetry is considered. Accordingly, Newtonian gravity is altered by adding an extra…