Related papers: Testing dark matter with high-redshift supernovae
Gravitationally lensed Type Ia supernovae are an emerging probe with great potential for constraining dark energy, spatial curvature, and the Hubble constant. The multiple images and their time delayed and magnified fluxes may be…
The ESA cornerstone mission The Far-Infrared and Submillimetre Sapce Telescope (FIRST) has the ideal combination of sensitivity and angular resolving power to determine the bright counts of galaxies over a large area of sky in the…
Ordinary baryonic particles (such as protons and neutrons) account for only one-sixth of the total matter in the Universe. The remainder is a mysterious "dark matter" component, which does not interact via the electromagnetic force and thus…
While dark matter (DM) makes up roughly 80% of the total matter in the Universe, its microscopic properties remain one of the biggest questions in Cosmology today. Fortunately, those properties dictate the distribution and form of…
Inspired by a new compilation of strong lensing systems, which consist of 204 points in the redshift range $0.0625< z_{l} < 0.958$ for the lens and $0.196< z_{s} < 3.595$ for the source, we constrain three models that generate a late cosmic…
Dark matter is an important ingredient of galaxies, as was recognised early on by Ken Freeman himself! Evidence for dark matter halos is still indirect, based on analysing motions of tracers such as gas and stars. In a sense the visible…
The existence of strong lensing systems with Einstein radii (Re) covering the full mass spectrum, from ~1-2" (produced by galaxy scale dark matter haloes) to >10" (produced by galaxy cluster scale haloes) have long been predicted. Many…
Microlensing has established itself as a powerful new method for the detection of baryonic dark matter in the Galaxy. The theory of microlensing is sketched and its similarity with the optical effect of twinkling is explained. The bulk of…
More than half of the volume of our Universe is occupied by cosmic voids. The lensing magnification effect from those under-dense regions is generally thought to give a small dimming contribution: objects on the far side of a void are…
It is now, generally, believed that the presence of some form of dark matter is essential to explain the flat rotation curves of galaxies, and anomalous large velocities of galaxies in the clusters and superclusters. This dark matter turns…
To reveal the galactic dark matter in the form of MACHOs ("Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects"), the POINT-AGAPE collaboration is carrying out a search for gravitational microlensing towards M31. A clear microlensing signal is…
The combination of deep exposures and high resolution offered by telescopes in space allows the detection of lensing over a wide range of source redshifts and lens masses. As an example, we model a lens candidate found in the southern…
We investigate the effect of microlensing on the standardisation of strongly lensed Type Ia supernovae (GLSNe Ia). We present predictions for the amount of scatter induced by microlensing across a range of plausible strong lens macromodels.…
Many high velocity HI clouds (HVCs) are now believed to be scattered throughout the Galactic halo on scales of tens of kiloparsecs. Some of these clouds appear to contain substantial HI masses (>10^6 Msun). It has been suggested that these…
Extreme magnifications of distant objects by factors of several thousand have recently become a reality. Small very luminous compact objects, such as supernovae (SNe), giant stars at z=1-2, Pop III stars at z>7 and even gravitational waves…
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…
The theory of General Relativity predicts that, since massive bodies curve spacetime, light from a distant source would be deflected by a foreground massive object -- a phenomenon known as \emph{Gravitational Lensing}. Historically, the…
Dark matter is thought to make up most of the matter density of the Universe, yet its true nature remains uncertain. Among dark matter theories, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are a prominent candidate for dark matter because…
The residuals of the distance moduli of Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) relative to a Hubble diagram fit contain information about the inhomogeneity of the universe, due to weak lensing magnification by foreground matter. By correlating the…
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…