Related papers: Quasar-galaxy associations revisited
It has been claimed that the variability of field quasars resembles gravitational lensing by a large cosmological population of free-floating planets with mass of about 10 Earths. But Galactic photometric monitoring experiments, on the…
We have observed the galaxy environments around a sample of 21 radio-loud, steep-spectrum quasars at 0.5<z<0.82, spanning several orders of magnitude in radio luminosity. The observations also include background control fields used to…
We investigate the anti-correlation between faint high redshift QSOs and low redshift galaxy groups found by Boyle, Fong & Shanks (1988), on the assumption that it is caused by gravitational lensing of a flat QSO number count, rather than…
We explore a variety of statistics of clusters selected with cosmic shear measurement by utilizing both analytic models and large numerical simulations. We first develop a halo model to predict the abundance and the clustering of weak…
Recent observations show a population of active galaxies with milliarcseconds offsets between optical and radio emission. Such offsets can be an indication of extreme phenomena associated with supermassive black holes including relativistic…
In a recent paper, Hawkins (1997) argues on the basis of statistical studies of double-image gravitational lenses and lens candidates that a large population of dark lenses exists and that these outnumber galaxies with more normal…
The study of absorptions along the lines of sight to bright high-$z$ QSOs is an invaluable cosmological tool that provides a wealth of information on the inter-/circum-galactic medium, Dark Matter, primordial elements, reionization,…
Strong gravitational lensing provides a powerful probe of the physical properties of quasars and their host galaxies. A high fraction of the most luminous high-redshift quasars was predicted to be lensed due to magnification bias. However,…
We simulate the effects of gravitational lensing on the source count of high redshift galaxies as projected to be observed by the Hubble Frontier Fields program and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in the near future. Taking the mass…
Quasars acting as strong gravitational lenses offer a rare opportunity to probe the redshift evolution of scaling relations between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies, particularly the $M_{\mathrm{BH}}$--$M_{\mathrm{host}}$…
Context. Strong lenses are a biased subset of the general population of galaxies. Aims. The goal of this work is to quantify how lens galaxies and lensed sources differ from their parent distribution, namely the strong lensing bias.…
We demonstrate that high-redshift 1-Jansky radio sources are correlated with foreground IRAS galaxies on angular scales of several 10 arc minutes on a statistical significance level of up to 99.8\%. Based on a theoretical analysis published…
Context. Observations of quasars shining through foreground galaxies, offer a way to probe the dust extinction curves of distant galaxies. Interesting objects for this study are found in strong gravitational lensing systems, where the…
We investigate the relationship between quasars and close companion galaxies using photometry and spectroscopy from the large data set of the SDSS DR16 survey. From the SDSS-QSO catalog of quasars, we selected objects with 0.1 < z < 0.35…
We explore how the local environment is related to properties of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) of various luminosities. Recent simulations and observations are converging on the view that the extreme luminosity of quasars, the brightest of…
We exploit the VST ATLAS quasar/QSO catalogue to perform three measurements of the quasar halo mass profile. First, we make a new estimate of the angular auto-correlation function of $\approx230,000$ ATLAS quasars with $z_{photo}\lesssim…
Some recent work on radio source fields at z~0.7 and z~4 is discussed. At z~0.7 we find that radio-loud quasars are typically found in moderately rich environments independent of radio luminosity, consistent with previous results at z~0.5.…
Recent observations suggest appreciable star formation activity in early-type galaxies down to redshift $z\sim 0.5$. If so, there is likely to be dust in these galaxies. We consider the possibility that obscuration by dust can reconcile the…
Flexion is the significant third-order weak gravitational lensing effect responsible for the weakly skewed and arc-like appearance of lensed galaxies. Here we demonstrate how flexion measurements can be used to measure galaxy halo density…
We present an estimation of the expected number of arcs and arclets in a sample of nearby (z<0.1) clusters of galaxies, that takes into account the magnitude limit of the objects as well as seeing effects. We show that strong lensing…