Related papers: An internally consistent distance framework in the…
The existence of an arc statistics problem was at the center of a strong debate in the last fifteen years. With the aim to clarify if the optical depth for giant gravitational arcs by galaxy clusters in the so called concordance model is…
We review knowledge of galaxy structures obtained by their emitted light and in the local universe where they can be studied in great detail. We discuss the shapes of, and stellar motions within, galaxies, compositional clues derived from…
The measurement of angular diameter distance to galaxy clusters, through combined Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect data with X-ray emission observations, is now a well-known probe of cosmology. Using a combination of SZ data and a map of the…
A homogeneous set of $n$ points in the $d$-dimensional Euclidean space determines at least $\Omega(n^{2d/(d^2+1)} / \log^{c(d)} n)$ distinct distances for a constant $c(d)>0$. In three-space, we slightly improve our general bound and show…
Measurements of the luminosity distance have played a key role in discovering the late-time cosmic acceleration. However, when accounting for inhomogeneities in the Universe, its interpretation has been plagued with infrared divergences in…
Accurate characterization of stellar populations is of prime importance to correctly understand the formation and evolution process of our Galaxy. The field of asteroseismology has been particularly successful in such an endeavor providing…
Measurements of cosmological parameters via the distance-redshift relation usually rely on models that assume a homogenous universe. It is commonly presumed that the large-scale structure evident in our Universe has a negligible impact on…
The cosmic distance duality relation is a milestone of cosmology involving the luminosity and angular diameter distances. Any departure of the relation points to new physics or systematic errors in the observations, therefore tests of the…
We live at a time of contradictory messages about how successfully we understand gravity. General Relativity seems to work very well in the Earth's immediate neighborhood, but arguments abound that it needs modification at very small and/or…
Surveys of the local and distant Universe are the means to test and improve our models of galaxy formation. Substantial successes in the models are evident, while there is also considerable recent progress in identifying what remains to be…
Using near infrared UKIDSS Galactic Plane Survey data, we make extinction measurements to individual stars along the same line of sight as molecular clouds. Using an existing 3D extinction map of the inner Galaxy, that provides line of…
A large fraction of known galaxy-lens systems require a component of external shear to explain the observed image geometries. In most cases, this shear can be attributed to a nearby group of galaxies. We discuss how the dark-matter mass…
For precision cosmological studies it is important to know the local properties of the reference point from which we observe the Universe. Particularly for the determination of the Hubble constant with low-redshift distance indicators, the…
The analysis of the spatial distribution and kinematics of galaxies in clusters allows one to determine the cluster internal dynamics. In this paper, I review the state of the art of this topic. In particular, I summarize what we have…
We exploit cosmological-model independent measurements of the expansion history of the Universe to provide a cosmic distance ladder. These are supernovae type Ia used as standard candles (at redshift between 0.01 and 1.3) and baryon…
A serious limitation in the study of many globular clusters -- especially those located near the Galactic Center -- has been the existence of large and differential extinction by foreground dust. In a series of papers we intend to map the…
State-of-the-art detection systems are generally evaluated on their ability to exhaustively retrieve objects densely distributed in the image, across a wide variety of appearances and semantic categories. Orthogonal to this, many real-life…
Weak gravitational lensing of distant galaxies by foreground structures has proven to be a powerful tool to study the mass distribution in the universe. Nowadays, attention has shifted from clusters of galaxies to the statistical properties…
New estimates of the distances of 36 nearby galaxies are presented based on accurate distances of galactic Cepheids obtained by Gieren, Fouque and Gomez (1998) from the geometrical Barnes-Evans method. The concept of 'sosie' is applied to…
Galaxy clusters are important targets for peculiar velocity studies as a direct comparison of the various distance indicators can be made. The potential problem of an environmental effect biasing the distances to clusters of different…