Related papers: How much dark matter really matters?
The phenomenon of cosmic shear, or distortion of images of distant sources unaccompanied by magnification, is an effective way of probing the content and state of the foreground Universe, because light rays do not have to pass through mass…
Strong gravitational lensing at the galaxy scale is a valuable tool for various applications in astrophysics and cosmology. The primary uses of galaxy-scale lensing are to study elliptical galaxies' mass structure and evolution, constrain…
We study the prospects for three-dimensional mapping of the dark matter to high redshift through the shearing of faint galaxies images at multiple distances by gravitational lensing. Such maps could provide invaluable information on the…
One of the great mysteries of contemporary science is dark matter, an exotic substance of unknown nature that, in theory, makes up about 27\% of the total mass-energy density of the universe, and which does not appear to emit, absorb, or…
The magnification induced by gravitational microlensing is sensitive to the size of a source relative to the Einstein radius, the natural microlensing scale length. This paper investigates the effect of source size in the case where the…
Strong gravitational lenses allow us to peer into the farthest reaches of space by bending the light from a background object around a massive object in the foreground. Unfortunately, these lenses are extremely rare, and manually finding…
Strong-lensing images provide a wealth of information both about the magnified source and about the dark matter distribution in the lens. Precision analyses of these images can be used to constrain the nature of dark matter. However, this…
Dark matter is a fundamental constituent of the universe, which is needed to explain a wide variety of astrophysical and cosmological observations. Although the existence of dark matter was first postulated nearly a century ago and its…
Gravitational Lensing is a UNIQUE tool to constrain the mass distribution of collapsed structures, this is particularly true for galaxies, either on a case by case basis using multiple images of background sources (such as quasars), or…
Gravitational lensing - the deflection of light rays by gravitating matter - has become a major tool in the armoury of the modern cosmologist. Proposed nearly a hundred years ago as a key feature of Einstein's theory of General Relativity,…
Weak gravitational lensing surveys measure the distortion of the image of distant sources due to the deflections of light rays by the fluctuations of the gravitational potential along the line of sight. Since they probe the non-linear…
In this non-specialist review I look at how weak lensing can provide information on the dark sector of the Universe. The review concentrates on what can be learned about Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Dark Gravity, and why. On Dark Matter,…
We investigate how strong gravitational lensing can test contemporary models of massive elliptical (ME) galaxy formation, by combining a traditional decomposition of their visible stellar distribution with a lensing analysis of their mass…
We investigate strong gravitational lensing in the concordance $\Lambda$CDM cosmology by carrying out ray-tracing along past light cones through the Millennium Simulation, the largest simulation of cosmic structure formation ever carried…
Gravitational lensing is a powerful tool for constraining substructure in the mass distribution of galaxies, be it from the presence of dark matter sub-halos or due to physical mechanisms affecting the baryons throughout galaxy evolution.…
Cold dark matter (CDM) constitutes most of the matter in the Universe. The interplay between dark and luminous matter in dense cosmic environments like galaxy clusters is studied theoretically using cosmological simulations. Observed…
[Abridged] Many current and future astronomical surveys will rely on samples of strong gravitational lens systems to draw conclusions about galaxy mass distributions. We use a new strong lensing pipeline (presented in Paper I of this…
It is shown which properties of a strong gravitational lens can in principle be recovered from observations of multiple extended images when no assumptions are made about the deflector or sources. The mapping between individual multiple…
Strong lensing gravitational time delays are a powerful and cost effective probe of dark energy. Recent studies have shown that a single lens can provide a distance measurement with 6-7 % accuracy (including random and systematic…
Gravitational lensing allows us to probe the structure of matter on a broad range of astronomical scales, and as light from a distant source traverses an intervening galaxy, compact matter such as planets, stars, and black holes act as…