Related papers: Cosmological nanolensing by dense gas clouds
We investigate the weak lensing effects of line-of-sight structures on quadruple images in quasar-galaxy strong lens systems based on N-body and ray-tracing simulations that can resolve halos with a mass of 10^5 solar mass. The intervening…
Recent deep millimeter-wave surveys attempt to measure the carbon monoxide (CO) luminosity function and mean molecular gas density through blind detections of CO emission lines. While the cosmic star formation rate density is now…
A large number of cosmological studies now suggest that roughly two-thirds of the critical energy density of the Universe exists in a component with negative pressure. If the equation of state of such an energy component varies with time,…
Multiply-imaged quasar lenses can be used to constrain the substructure mass fraction in galaxy-sized dark matter halos via anomalous flux ratios in lensed images. The flux ratios, however, can be affected by both the substructure in the…
Weak gravitational lensing is responsible for the shearing and magnification of the images of high-redshift sources due to the presence of intervening matter. The distortions are due to fluctuations in the gravitational potential, and are…
In strong gravitational lensing, the multiple images we see correspond to light rays that leave the source in slightly different directions. If the source emission is anisotropic, the images may differ from conventional lensing predictions…
The variability of active galactic nuclei (AGN) has long held the promise of shedding light on their detailed structure, and possibly other astrophysical phenonema. Different emission mechanisms lead to different patterns of variability in…
Gravitational wave sources are a promising cosmological standard candle because their intrinsic luminosities are determined by fundamental physics (and are insensitive to dust extinction). They are, however, affected by weak lensing…
Very deep imaging data of three optically luminous radio-loud quasars with redshifts between z=0.9 and z=1.36 are presented. The data are complete for galaxies down to R=26. There is no evidence for excess numbers of galaxies around the…
Unless properly corrected for, the existence of intergalactic dust will introduce a redshift dependent magnitude offset to standard candle sources. This would lead to overestimated luminosity distances compared to a dust-free universe and…
If the Galaxy contains ~10^{11}M_sol in cold gas clouds of ~Jovian mass and \~AU size, these clouds will act as converging lenses for optical light, magnifying background stars at a detectable rate. The resulting light curves can resemble…
A small fraction of all quasars are strongly lensed and multiply imaged, with usually a galaxy acting as the main lens. Some, maybe all of these quasars are also affected by microlensing, the effects of stellar mass objects in the lensing…
The magnifications of compact-source lenses are extremely sensitive to the presence of low mass dark matter halos along the entire sight line from the source to the observer. Traditionally, the study of dark matter structure in…
Recent models for the emission clouds within the Broad Line Region of quasars suggest that they are due to transient overdensities within an overall turbulent medium. If this were the case, the broad line emission would spatially appear…
We put robust upper limits on the average cosmological density \Omega_s of cosmic strings based on the variability properties of a large homogeneous sample of SDSS quasars. We search for an excess of characteristic variations of quasar…
The fraction of quasar's and gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows that vary due to microlensing by the stellar populations of intervening elliptical/S0 galaxies is computed by combining the joint distribution of effective microlensing…
We study the dependence of the number density and properties of quasars on the background galaxy density using the currently largest spectroscopic datasets of quasars and galaxies. We construct a galaxy number density field smoothed over…
Significant adjustments to the values of the cosmological parameters estimated from high-redshift Type Ia Supernov\ae data are reported, almost an order of magnitude greater than previously found. They arise from the effects of weak…
Dark matter caustics have specific density profiles and, therefore, precisely calculable gravitational lensing properties. We present a formalism which simplifies the relevant calculations, and apply it to four specific cases. In the first…
We investigate the luminosity and redshift dependence of the quasar continuum by means of composite spectrum using a large non-BAL radio-quiet quasar sample drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Quasar continuum slopes in the UV-Opt band…