Related papers: Galaxy imaging surveys as spin-sensitive detector …
Detection of a gravitational-wave signal of non-astrophysical origin would be a landmark discovery, potentially providing a significant clue to some of our most basic, big-picture scientific questions about the Universe. In this white…
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…
Halos and galaxies acquire their angular momentum during the collapse of surrounding large-scale structure. This process imprints alignments between galaxy spins and nearby filaments and sheets. Low mass halos grow by accretion onto…
We discuss the origin of galactic angular momentum, and the statistics of the present day spin distribution. It is expected that the galaxy spin axes are correlated with the intermediate principal axis of the gravitational shear tensor.…
We present a novel graph-based machine learning classifier for identifying the dark matter cosmic web environments of galaxies. Large galaxy surveys offer comprehensive statistical views of how galaxy properties are shaped by large-scale…
[ABRIDGED] I perform a detailed comparison of the shape of the optical luminosity functions as a function of galaxy class and filter, which have been obtained from redshift surveys with an effective depth ranging from z~0.01 to z~0.6. This…
Using the Horizon-AGN simulation we find a mass dependent spin orientation trend for galaxies: the spin of low-mass, rotation-dominated, blue, star-forming galaxies are preferentially aligned with their closest filament, whereas high-mass,…
After the discovery of a Higgs-like particle at the LHC, the determination of its spin quantum numbers across different channels will be the next step in arriving at a more precise understanding of the new state and its role in electroweak…
The alignments between galaxies, their underlying matter structures, and the cosmic web constitute vital ingredients for a comprehensive understanding of gravity, the nature of matter, and structure formation in the Universe. We provide an…
The gravitational lensing effect provides various ways to study the mass environment of galaxies. We investigate how galaxy-galaxy(-galaxy) lensing can be used to test models of galaxy formation and evolution. We consider two semi-analytic…
The Lenses Structure and Dynamics (LSD) Survey aims at measuring the luminous and dark matter distribution of high redshift early-type galaxies by combining gravitational lens analysis with newly determined velocity dispersion profiles.…
We report on some recent work, which points out the relevance of future measurements of gravitational waves by resonant-mass detectors of spherical shape for theories of gravity of non-Einstein type.
Weak gravitational lensing provides a unique method to directly measure the distribution of mass in the universe. Because the distortions induced by lensing in the shape of background galaxies are small, the measurement of weak lensing…
We report the first direct observational evidence for alignment of galaxy spin axes with the local tidal shear field. We measure quantitatively the strength of this directional correlation of disk galaxies from the Tully catalog with the…
Galaxy redshift surveys have achieved significant progress over the last couple of decades. Those surveys tell us in the most straightforward way what our local universe looks like. While the galaxy distribution traces the bright side of…
Understanding $\textit{galaxy bias}$ -- that is the statistical relation between matter and galaxies -- is of key importance for extracting cosmological information from galaxy surveys. While the bias function $f$ -- that is the probability…
Galaxy angular momentum directions (spins) are observable, well described by the Lagrangian tidal torque theory, and proposed to probe the primordial universe. They trace the spins of dark matter halos, and are indicators of protohalos…
We explore the motivation behind large stellar surveys in Galactic astronomy, in particular, surveys that measure the photometric, phase space and abundance properties of thousands or millions of stars. These observations are essential to…
The weak gravitational lensing of high redshift type Ia supernovae has the potential of probing the structure of matter on galaxy halo scales. This is complementary to the weak lensing of galaxies which probes structure of larger scales.…
Theoretical galaxy formation models are an established and powerful tool for interpreting the astrophysical significance of observational data, particularly galaxy surveys. Such models have been utilised with great success by optical…