Related papers: The 2dF gravitational lens survey
There are $\sim 1$, 0.1 and 0.01 gravitationally lensed X-ray sources per square degree with soft X-ray fluxes exceeding $10^{-15}, 10^{-14}$ and $10^{-13} ergs/s cm^{-2}$ respectively. These sources will be detected serendipitously with…
Very deep imaging data of three optically luminous radio-loud quasars with redshifts between z=0.9 and z=1.36 are presented. The data are complete for galaxies down to R=26. There is no evidence for excess numbers of galaxies around the…
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…
Recent discoveries by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) of four bright redshift z=6 quasars could constrain the mechanism by which the supermassive black holes powering these sources are assembled. Here we compute the probability that the…
The observed number counts of high-redshift galaxy candidates have been used to build up a statistical description of star-forming activity at redshift z >~ 7, when galaxies reionized the Universe. Standard models predict that a high…
The Euclid space telescope will observe ~10^5 strong galaxy-galaxy gravitational lens events in its wide field imaging survey over around half the sky, but identifying the gravitational lenses from their observed morphologies requires…
The best gravitational lenses for detecting distant galaxies are those with the largest mass concentrations and the most advantageous configurations of that mass along the line of sight. Our new method for finding such gravitational…
We reconstruct the underlying density field of the 2 degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) for the redshift range 0.035<z<0.200 using the Wiener Filtering method. The Wiener Filter suppresses shot noise and accounts for selection and…
The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey has already yielded over 130,000 galaxy spectra (out of the planned 250,000). We present a method for the parameterisation of galaxy spectra in the 2dF and other large redshift surveys using a new continuous…
We present a mock catalog of gravitationally lensed quasars at $z_\text{qso}<7.5$ with simulated images for the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). We adopt recent measurements of quasar luminosity functions to model…
Weak gravitational lensing can cause displacements, magnification, rotation and shearing of the images of distant galaxies. Most studies focus on the shear and magnification effects since they are more easily observed. In this paper we…
We present a spectroscopic survey for strong galaxy-galaxy lenses. Exploiting optimal sight-lines to massive, bulge-dominated galaxies at redshifts $z \sim 0.4$ with wide-field, multifibre spectroscopy, we anticipate the detection of 10-20…
The Planck Surveyor cosmic microwave background (CMB) imaging mission will make very sensitive maps of the whole sky at microwave, millimetre (mm) and sub-mm wavelengths. The steep source counts expected in the highest frequency Planck…
Accurate weak-lensing analysis requires not only accurate measurement of galaxy shapes but also precise and unbiased measurement of galaxy redshifts. The photometric redshift technique appears as the only possibility to determine the…
Searches and analyses of strong gravitational lenses are challenging due to the rarity and image complexity of these astronomical objects. Next-generation surveys (both ground- and space-based) will provide more opportunities to derive…
We consider the possibility that future wide-field time-domain optical imaging surveys may be able to discover gravitationally lensed quasar pairs through serendipitous measurements of their time delays. We discuss the merits such a…
We report on our observing program to obtain integrated spectrophotometry, intermediate and high resolution major axis spectra, and U,B,R surface photo- metry of a representative sample of ~200 galaxies in the nearby field. The main goal of…
The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey is now well underway, having already measured the redshifts to ~5600 galaxies in its first season of observations. Here I briefly review the survey itself, before discussing in more detail some of the…
We describe and apply a simple prescription for defining connected structures in galaxy redshift surveys. The method is based upon two passes with a friends-of-friends groupfinder. The first pass uses a cylindrical linking volume to find…
Most gravitational lens galaxies are early-type galaxies in relatively low density environments. We show that they lie on the same fundamental plane as early-type galaxies in both local and distant rich clusters. Their surface brightness…