Related papers: Sharp gap edges in dense planetary rings: An axisy…
We present the first detection of weak gravitational shear at infrared wavelengths, using observations of the lensing cluster Abell 1689, taken with the SofI camera on the ESO-NTT telescope. The imprint of cluster lenses on the shapes of…
We analyse the secular effects of a long-lived Galactic spiral structure on the stellar orbits with mean radii close to the corotation resonance. By test-particle simulations and different spiral potential models with parameters constrained…
Motivated by recent observations of plateaus and minima in the radial abundance distributions of heavy elements in the Milky Way and some other spiral galaxies, we propose a dynamical mechanism for the formation of such features around…
Recent X-ray observations of microquasars and Seyfert galaxies reveal the broad emission lines in their spectra, which can arise in the innermost parts of accretion disks. A theoretical analysis of observations and their interpretations…
Previous models have shown that stochastic scattering of stars in a two-dimensional galaxy disc can generate a time-independent surface density distribution that is an exponential divided by radius when a constant inward scattering bias is…
We prepare a quasi-non-diffracting Bessel beam defined within an annular angular spectrum with a spatial light modulator. The beam propagates though a strongly scattering media and the transmitted speckle pattern is measured at one point…
We investigate the continuum emission of viscous decretion discs around Be stars in this paper. The results obtained from non-LTE (local thermodynamic equilibrium) radiative transfer models show two regimes in the disc surface brightness…
Studies of strong gravitational lensing in current and upcoming wide and deep photometric surveys, and of stellar kinematics from (integral-field) spectroscopy at increasing redshifts, promise to provide valuable constraints on galaxy…
It is generally agreed that the rotational velocities of spiral galaxies indicate that a lot of matter is unseen. Hitherto, the majority of these mass models are all based on spherical symmetry, although this assumption is obviously not the…
Kinematic weak lensing describes the distortion of a galaxy's projected velocity field due to lensing shear, an effect recently reported for the first time by Gurri et al. based on a sample of 18 galaxies at $z \sim 0.1$. In this paper, we…
Recent work on the mass distribution in spiral galaxies, using mainly HI observations, is reviewed. The principal problem is still to determine to what extent the dark matter is important in the inner parts of a galaxy, or in other words,…
It is well known that the surface brightness of elliptical galaxies and of bulges of spiral galaxies is best fitted by the Sersic r^{1/n} profile. It is thus interesting to explore the lensing properties of the Sersic model because of its…
The determination of characteristic amplitudes and anisotropy of hot gas motions in galaxy clusters from observations of the brightest resonance lines is discussed. Gas motions affect (i) the spectral line shape through the Doppler effect…
Aims. Falomo et al. (2005) discovered a disk-like galaxy at ~ 1.2 arcsec from the QSO Q0045-3337 by means of ESO VLT adaptive optics. They estimated a galaxy Einstein radius (for a point mass) of comparable size, thus pointing up the…
Planetary rings produce a distinct shape distortion in transit lightcurves. However, to accurately model such lightcurves the observations need to cover the entire transit, especially ingress and egress, as well as an out-of-transit…
We present mass models for the dark matter component of seven dwarf galaxies taken from "The HI Nearby Galaxy Survey" (THINGS) and compare these with those from numerical Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) simulations. The THINGS…
We study the elastic scattering of a planar wave in the curved spacetime of a compact object such as a neutron star, via a heuristic model: a scalar field impinging upon a spherically-symmetric uniform density star of radius $R$ and mass…
The transport of an infinitely thin, hard rod in a random, dense array of point obstacles is investigated by molecular dynamics simulations. Our model mimics the sterically hindered dynamics in dense needle liquids. The center-of-mass…
The recent discovery of dense rings around the Centaur Chariklo (and possibly Chiron) reveals that complete dense planetary rings are not only found around Saturn and Uranus, but also around small bodies orbiting in the vicinity of those…
We have made a high resolution study of the specularity of the atomic reflection from an evanescent wave mirror using velocity selective Raman transitions. We have observed a double structure in the velocity distribution after reflection: a…