Related papers: Analysis of quasar magnitudes
Although dust is widely found in astrophysics, forming dust is surprisingly difficult. The proper combination of low temperature (<2000 K) and high density is mainly found in the winds of late-type giant and supergiant stars which, as a…
The orientation-dependence of the optical continuum emission in radio-loud quasars is investigated using a new, complete sample of low-frequency-selected quasars, the Molonglo Quasar Sample (MQS). The optical continuum is found to be highly…
Galaxy shapes are not randomly oriented, rather they are statistically aligned in a way that can depend on formation environment, history and galaxy type. Studying the alignment of galaxies can therefore deliver important information about…
We revisit the classical view that quasar contribution to the reionization of hydrogen is unimportant. When secondary ionization are taken into account, in many plausible scenarios for the formation and growth of supermassive black holes…
Recent cosmological observations suggest that nearly seventy per cent of the energy density in the universe is unclustered and has negative pressure. Several conceptual issues related to the modeling of this component (`dark energy'), which…
As discussed in a number of recent papers, cosmological stasis is a phenomenon wherein the abundances of multiple cosmological energy components with different equations of state remain constant for an extended period despite the expansion…
We propose a new interpretation of the quasar luminosity function (LF), derived from physically motivated models of quasar lifetimes and light curves. In our picture, quasars evolve rapidly and their lifetime depends on both their…
We present a new catalogue of ~2,400 optically selected quasars with spectroscopic redshifts and X-ray observations from either Chandra or XMM-Newton. The sample can be used to investigate the non-linear relation between the UV and X-ray…
This paper summarizes the physical mechanisms that encode the type and quantity of cosmological matter in the properties of large-scale structure, and reviews the application of such tests to current datasets. The key lengths of the horizon…
Within conventional big bang cosmology, it has proven to be very difficult to understand why today's cosmological constant is so small. In this paper, we show that a cyclic model of the universe can naturally incorporate a dynamical…
The non-linear relation between the X-ray and ultraviolet (UV) luminosity in quasars has been used to derive quasar distances and to build a Hubble diagram at redshifts up to $z\sim$ 7. This cosmological application is based on the…
Using a singular isothermal sphere model for the matter distribution of foreground clusters of galaxies, we study the statistics of giant arcs in flat cosmologies with and without a cosmological constant. We find that the relative number of…
We have made a survey of quasar environments at 0.5 < z < 0.8, using a sample of both radio-loud and radio-quiet quasars matched in B-band luminosity. Our observations include images of background control fields to provide a good…
There is a deep cosmological mystery: although dependent on very different underlying physics, the timescales of structure formation, of galaxy cooling (both radiatively and against the CMB), and of vacuum domination do not differ by many…
We present the leading order non-linear density and velocity power spectra in the complete form; previous studies have omitted the vector- and tensor-type perturbations simultaneously excited by the scalar-type perturbation in nonlinear…
The presence of dark energy in the Universe is inferred directly and indirectly from a large body of observational evidence. The simplest and most theoretically appealing possibility is the vacuum energy density (cosmological constant).…
We discuss a cosmological model where the universe shrinks rather than expands during the radiation and matter dominated periods. Instead, the Planck mass and all particle masses grow exponentially, with the size of atoms shrinking…
The quark matter may have great implications in astrophysical studies, which could appear in the early Universe, in compact stars, and/or as cosmic rays. After a general review of astrophysical quark matter, the density-dominated quark…
We study the large-scale anisotropy of the Universe by measuring the dipole in the angular distribution of a flux-limited, all-sky sample of 1.36 million quasars observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). This sample is…
This paper reviews selected aspects of the growth of cosmological structure, covering the following general areas: (1) expected characteristics of linear density perturbations according to various candidate theories for the origin of…