Related papers: Building the high-redshift Hubble Diagram with qua…
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most luminous explosions and can be detectable out to the edge of Universe. It has long been thought they can extend the Hubble diagram to very high redshifts. Several correlations between temporal or…
Quasars are galaxies hosting accreting supermassive black holes; due to their brightness, they are unique probes of the early universe. To date, only few quasars have been reported at $z > 6.5$ ($<$800 Myr after the Big Bang). In this work,…
Relations connecting gamma ray burst quantities can be used to constrain cosmographic parameters of the Hubble law at medium-high redshifts. We consider a sample of 27 gamma ray bursts to construct the luminosity distance to redshift…
I discuss two programs to study radio-loud quasars at high (z>4) redshift. Quasars are the most luminous, non-transient objects known and are observed to the earliest cosmic epochs. At lower redshifts, radio-loud quasars are associated with…
We use 62,185 quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR5 sample and standard virial mass scaling laws based on the widths of H beta, Mg II, and C IV lines and adjacent continuum luminosities to explore the maximum mass of quasars as a…
Over the past decade, the disparity between the value of the cosmic expansion rate directly determined from measurements of distance and redshift or instead from the standard $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model calibrated by measurements from…
The identifications of quasars in the redshift range 2.2<z<3 are known to be very inefficient as their optical colors are indistinguishable from those of stars. Recent studies have proposed to use optical variability or near-IR colors to…
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have long been proposed as a complementary probe to type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) and cosmic microwave background to explore the expansion history of the high-redshift universe, mainly because they are bright enough to…
The rate at which the universe is expanding today is a fundamental parameter in cosmology which governs our understanding of structure formation and dark energy. However, current measurements of the Hubble constant, $H_0$, show a…
We consider the effects of large structures in the Universe on the Hubble diagram. This problem is treated non-linearly by considering a Swiss Cheese model of the Universe in which under-dense voids are represented as negatively curved…
The recent compilation of quasar (QSO) X-ray and UV flux measurements include QSOs that appear to not be standardizable via the X-ray luminosity and UV luminosity ($L_X-L_{UV}$) relation and so should not be used to constrain cosmological…
Hot big bang cosmology says nothing about the topology of the Universe. A topology-independent algorithm is presented which is complementary to that of Lehoucq et al. 1996 and which searches for evidence of multi-connectedness using…
We present near-infrared imaging with ESO VLT+ISAAC of the host galaxies of low luminosity quasars in the redshift range 1 < z < 2, aimed at investigating the relationship between the nuclear and host galaxy luminosities at high redshift.…
Around 70 $z>6.5$ luminous quasars have been discovered, strongly biased toward the bright end, thus not providing a comprehensive view on quasar abundance beyond cosmic dawn. We present the predicted results of Roman/Rubin high-redshift…
The determination of the Hubble constant has been a central goal in observational astrophysics for nearly 100 years. Extraordinary progress has occurred in recent years on two fronts: the cosmic distance ladder measurements at low redshift…
Although the Hubble constant $H_0$ and spatial curvature $\Omega_{K}$ have been measured with very high precision, they still suffer from some tensions. In this paper, we propose an improved method to combine the observations of…
As recently suggested, nearby quasar remnants are plausible sites of black-hole based compact dynamos that could be capable of accelerating ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs). In such a model, UHECRs would originate at the nuclei of…
We used the Hubble Space Telescope WFC3 near-infrared camera to image the host galaxies of a sample of eleven luminous, dust-reddened quasars at z ~ 2 -- the peak epoch of black hole growth and star formation in the Universe -- to test the…
We use six different cosmological models to study the recently-released compilation of X-ray and UV flux measurements of 2038 quasars (QSOs) which span the redshift range $0.009 \leq z \leq 7.5413$. We find, for the full QSO data set, that…
On the assumption that quasars (QSO) and gamma-ray bursts (GRB) represent \textit{standardisable candles}, we provide evidence that the Hubble constant $H_0$ adopts larger values in hemispheres aligned with the CMB dipole direction. If…