Related papers: Empirical constraints on alternative gravity theor…
The study of dark matter substructure through strong gravitational lensing has shown enormous promise in probing the properties of dark matter on sub-galactic scales. This approach has already been used to place strong constraints on a wide…
Weak gravitational lensing of distant galaxies by foreground structures has proven to be a powerful tool to study the mass distribution in the universe. Nowadays, attention has shifted from clusters of galaxies to the statistical properties…
According to the theory of general relativity, masses deflect light in a way similar to convex glass lenses. This gravitational lensing effect is astigmatic, giving rise to image distortions. These distortions allow to quantify cosmic…
Strong field gravitational lensing in the Brans-Dicke theory has been studied. The deflection angle for photons passing very close to the photon sphere is estimated for the static spherically symmetric space-time of the theory and the…
A standard method to study the mass distribution in galaxy clusters is through strong lensing of background galaxies in which the positions of multiple images of the same source constrain the surface mass distribution of the cluster.…
Deflection of light by gravity was predicted by General Relativity and observationaly confirmed in 1919. In the following decades various aspects of the gravitational lens effect were explored theoretically, among them the possibility of…
Most of the matter in the universe is not luminous and can be observed directly only through its gravitational effect. An emerging technique called weak gravitational lensing uses background galaxies to reveal the foreground dark matter…
Gravitational lensing directly measures mass density fluctuations along the lines of sight to very distant objects. No assumptions need to be made concerning bias, the ratio of fluctuations in galaxy density to mass density. Hence, lensing…
The observables in a strong gravitational lens are usually just the image positions and sometimes the flux ratios. We develop a new and simple algorithm which allows a set of models to be fitted exactly to the observations. Taking our cue…
We propose a new approach for measuring the mass profile and shape of groups and clusters of galaxies, which uses lensing magnification of distant background galaxies. The main advantage of lensing magnification is that, unlike lensing…
Although general relativity underlies modern cosmology, its applicability on cosmological length scales has yet to be stringently tested. Such a test has recently been proposed, using a quantity, EG, that combines measures of large-scale…
This paper reviews statistical methods recently developed to reconstruct and analyze dark matter mass maps from weak lensing observations. The field of weak lensing is motivated by the observations made in the last decades showing that 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…
Weak gravitational lensing provides a means of testing the long-range properties of gravity. Current measurements are consistent with standard Newtonian gravity and inconsistent with substantial modifications on Mpc scales. The data allows…
Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) is an alternative theory of gravity that aims to explain large-scale dynamics without recourse to any form of dark matter. However the theory is incomplete, lacking a relativistic counterpart, and so makes…
The standard approach to test for deviations from general relativity on cosmological scales is to combine measurements of the growth rate of structure with gravitational lensing. In this study, we show that this method suffers from an…
We present a framework that reformulates gravitational lensing as an optical phenomenon governed by an effective refractive index, enabling exploration of modified gravity theories using undergraduate-level mathematics and optics. After…
The Beyond Horndeski class of alternative gravity theories allow for Self-accelerating de-Sitter cosmologies with no need for a cosmological constant. This makes them viable alternatives to $\Lambda$CDM and so testing their small-scale…
A particular open problem in cosmology is whether dark matter on small scales is clumpy, forming gravitationally-bound halos distributed within the Galaxy. The practical difficulties inherent in testing this hypothesis stem from the fact…
Weak gravitational lensing, the deflection of light by mass, is one of the best tools to constrain the growth of cosmic structure with time and reveal the nature of dark energy. I discuss the sources of systematic uncertainty in weak…