Related papers: A million-solar-mass object detected at cosmologic…
Measuring the density profile and mass concentration of dark-matter haloes is a key test of the standard cold dark matter paradigm. Such objects are dark and thus challenging to characterise, but they can be studied via gravitational…
The mass-function of dwarf satellite galaxies that are observed around Local Group galaxies substantially differs from simulations based on cold dark matter: the simulations predict many more dwarf galaxies than are seen. The Local Group,…
Most of the matter in the universe is not luminous and can be observed directly only through its gravitational effect. An emerging technique called weak gravitational lensing uses background galaxies to reveal the foreground dark matter…
Gravitational lensing is a powerful tool for quantifying the mass content and distribution in distant galaxies. By using milliarcsecond angular resolution observations of radio-loud gravitationally lensed sources it is also possible to…
Gravitational lensing is a powerful tool to detect compact matter on very different mass scales. Of particular importance is the fact that lensing is sensitive to both luminous and dark matter alike. Depending on the mass scale, all lensing…
Dark Matter (DM) halos with masses below $\sim10^{8}$ $M_{\odot}$, which would help to discriminate between DM models, may be detected through their gravitational effect on distant sources. The same applies to primordial black holes,…
We report a significant detection of weak, tangential distortion of the images of cosmologically distant, faint galaxies due to gravitational lensing by foreground galaxies. A mean image polarisation of $<p>=0.011\pm 0.006$ is measured for…
This paper aims to quantify how the lowest halo mass that can be detected with galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lensing depends on the quality of the observations and the characteristics of the observed lens systems. Using simulated data,…
A high optical depth to gravitational microlensing towards the galactic bulge is consistent with current models of the galactic bar. The low optical depth towards the LMC can probably be accounted for by the ordinary stars in our galaxy and…
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…
We report a detection of the coherent distortion of faint galaxies arising from gravitational lensing by foreground structures. This ``cosmic shear'' is potentially the most direct measure of the mass power spectrum, as it is unaffected by…
Stringent observational constraints on the sub-galactic matter power spectrum would allow one to distinguish between the concordance $\Lambda$CDM and the various alternative dark-matter models that predict significantly different properties…
A particular open problem in cosmology is whether dark matter on small scales is clumpy, forming gravitationally-bound halos distributed within the Galaxy. The practical difficulties inherent in testing this hypothesis stem from the fact…
We explore the lowest mass limit that can be placed on the halo mass function in CDM using 28 strong gravitational lenses. For this purpose, we study an extreme model in which the halo mass function and mass-concentration relation follow…
The measurements of the possible gravitational microlensing events are analysed with a simple yet accurate disc--halo model of the Milky Way Galaxy. This comprises a luminous exponential disc embedded in a flattened dark matter halo with…
A long-standing problem in astrophysics is to measure the mass associated with galaxies. Gravitational lensing provides one of the cleanest ways to make this measurement. To date, the most powerful lensing probes of galactic mass have been…
While the direct detection of the dark-matter particle remains very challenging, the nature of dark matter could be possibly constrained by comparing the observed abundance and properties of small-scale sub-galactic mass structures with…
We report the detection of a dark substructure through direct gravitational imaging - undetected in the HST-ACS F814W image - in the gravitational lens galaxy of SLACS SDSSJ0946+1006 (the "Double Einstein Ring"). The detection is based on a…
It has been shown by Paczy\'nski that gravitational microlensing is potentially a useful method for detecting the dark constituents of the halo of our galaxy, if their mass lies in the approximate domain $10^{-6} < M/M_{\odot} < 10^{-1}$.…
The aim of this work is to show, in the framework of a simple finite-width disk model, that the amount of mass seen through gravitational microlensing measurements in the region $0<R<R0$ is consistent with the dynamical mass ascertained…