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In a system of noisy self-propelled particles with interactions that favor directional alignment, collective motion will appear if the density of particles is beyond a critical density. Starting with a reduced model for collective motion,…
We present a simple method to constrain the total mass of groups of galaxies. Tidal theory predicts that a limit to the mass of bound groups of galaxies can be obtained by using the fact that the tidal forces due to the external mass…
Galaxy clusters are considered as excellent probes for cosmology. For that purpose, their mass needs to be measured and their structural properties needs to be understood. We propose a method for galaxy cluster mass reconstruction which…
The kinematics of the Milky Way (MW) and M31, the dominant galaxies in the Local Group (LG), can be used to estimate the LG total mass. New results on the M31 proper motion have recently been used to improve that estimate. Those results are…
Much current interest in cosmology has revolved around the peculiar velocity field of galaxies. Many methods have been proposed to derive this, probably the most prominent being POTENT (Dekel et al. 1990). However, this is prone to many…
Using N-body simulations of flat, dark energy dominated cosmologies, we show that galaxies around simulated binary systems resembling the Local Group (LG) have low peculiar velocities, in good agreement with observational data. We have…
Near-field cosmology -- using detailed observations of the Local Group and its environs to study wide-ranging questions in galaxy formation and dark matter physics -- has become a mature and rich field over the past decade. There are…
We present a novel approach for reconstructing the projected mass distribution of clusters of galaxies from sparse and noisy weak gravitational lensing shear data. The reconstructions are regularised using knowledge gained from numerical…
The analysis of optical images of galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lensing systems can provide important information about the distribution of dark matter at small scales. However, the modeling and statistical analysis of these images is…
Combining our knowledge of halo structure and internal kinematics from cosmological dark matter simulations and the distribution of halo interlopers in projected phase space measured in cosmological galaxy simulations, we develop MAGGIE, a…
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has proven to be uniquely suited for the measurement of proper motions (PMs) of stars and galaxies in the nearby Universe. Here we summarize the main results and ongoing studies of the HSTPROMO…
A study of the group properties of galaxies in our immediate neighborhood provides a singular opportunity to observationally constrain the halo mass function, a fundamental characterization of galaxy formation. Detailed studies of…
Weak gravitational lensing provides a unique method to directly measure the distribution of mass in the universe. Because the distortions induced by lensing in the shape of background galaxies are small, the measurement of weak lensing…
We present a new set of high-resolution hydrodynamic cosmological zoom-in simulations that apply the Feedback In Realistic Environments (FIRE) physics to both Local Group (LG)-like and isolated Milky Way (MW)-like volumes (ten host systems…
The local universe is the best known part of our universe. Within the CLUES project (http://clues-project.org - Constrained Local UniversE Simulations) we perform numerical simulations of the evolution of the local universe. For these…
We describe the construction of an N-body simulation that mimics the true velocity and mass-density fields in a box of side 256\hmpc about the Local Group , and the production of mock catalogs that mimic in detail current catalogs of…
The "Lambda Cold Dark Matter" (LCDM) model of cosmic structure formation is eminently falsifiable: once its parameters are fixed on large scales, it becomes testable in the nearby Universe. Observations within our Local Group of galaxies,…
After recent systematic optical, IR, and HI surveys, the total number of known galaxies within 10 Mpc has increased from 179 to 550. About half this Local Volume (LV) sample is now been imaged with HST, yielding the galaxy distances with an…
Weak gravitational lensing is a promising tool for the study of the mass distribution in the Universe. Here we report some partial results that show how lensing maps can be used to differentiate between cosmological models. We pay special…
Current efforts in observational cosmology are focused on characterizing the mass-energy content of the Universe. We present results from a geometric test based on strong lensing in galaxy clusters. Based on Hubble Space Telescope images…