Related papers: GravSphere2: A higher-order Jeans method for mass-…
We examine how future gravitational-wave measurements from merging black holes (BHs) can be used to infer the shape of the black-hole mass function, with important implications for the study of star formation and evolution and the…
Observations of galaxy-scale strong gravitational lensing systems enable unique tests of departures from general relativity at the kpc-Mpc scale. In this work, the gravitational slip parameter $\gamma_{\rm PN}$, measuring the amplitude of a…
In order to retrieve cosmological parameters from photometric surveys, we need to estimate the distribution of the photometric redshift in the sky with excellent accuracy. We use and apply three different machine learning methods to…
(Abridged) We introduce a novel technique to construct spatially resolved maps of stellar mass surface density in galaxies based on optical and near IR imaging. We use optical/NIR colour(s) to infer effective stellar mass-to-light ratios…
Joint lensing and dynamical mass profile determinations of galaxy clusters are an excellent tool to constrain modification of gravity at cosmological scales. However, search for tiny departures from General Relativity calls for an accurate…
Gravitational-wave detections have revealed a previously unknown population of stellar mass black holes with masses above $20\, M_{\odot}$. These observations provide a new way to test models of stellar evolution for massive stars. By…
The statistics of gravitational lensing can provide us with a very powerful probe of the mass distribution of matter in the universe. By comparing predicted strong lensing probabilities with observations, we can test the mass distribution…
Context. Current constraints on distributed matter in the innermost Galactic Centre (such as a cluster of faint stars and stellar remnants, Dark Matter or a combination thereof) based on the orbital dynamics of the visible stars closest to…
[Abridged] Aims. The lowest-mass galaxies, ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, promise unparalleled constraints on how feedback regulates galaxy formation, and on the small-scale matter power spectrum. Their inner dark-matter densities can also be…
We present a quantitative analysis of the largest contiguous maps of projected mass density obtained from gravitational lensing shear. We use data from the 154 deg2 covered by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey. Our study is…
We constrain the mass profile and orbital structure of nearby groups and clusters of galaxies. Our method yields the joint probability distribution of the density slope n, the velocity anisotropy beta, and the turnover radius r0 for these…
We consider here a new statistical measure for cosmic shear, the aperture mass Map, which is defined as a spatially filtered projected density field and which can be measured directly from the image distortions of high-redshift galaxies. By…
As the hunt for an Earth-like exoplanets has intensified in recent years, so has the effort to characterise and model the stellar signals that can hide or mimic small planetary signals. Stellar variability arises from a number of sources,…
We investigate how accurately phase space distribution functions (DFs) in galactic models can be reconstructed by a made-to-measure (M2M) method, which constructs $N$-particle models of stellar systems from photometric and various kinematic…
The use of Gaussian processes (GPs) as models for astronomical time series datasets has recently become almost ubiquitous, given their ease of use and flexibility. GPs excel in particular at marginalization over the stellar signal in cases…
Using a flexible galactic model with variable stellar velocity anisotropy, I apply the classical Jeans mass modeling approach to the five dwarf spheroidal galaxies with the largest homogeneous datasets of stellar line-of-sight velocities…
We present a non-parametric technique to infer the projected-mass distribution of a gravitational lens system with multiple strong-lensed images. The technique involves a dynamic grid in the lens plane on which the mass distribution of the…
We approach multivariate mode estimation through Gibbs distributions and introduce GERVE (Gibbs-measure Entropy-Regularised Variational Estimation), a likelihood-free framework that approximates Gibbs measures directly from samples by…
Evidence that the Universe may be close to the critical density, required for its expansion eventually to be halted, comes principally from dynamical studies of large-scale structure. These studies either use the observed peculiar velocity…
We propose the novel method of ``gravitational imaging'' to detect and quantify luminous and dark-matter substructure in gravitational-lens galaxies. The method utilizes highly-magnified Einstein rings and arcs as sensitive probes of small…