Related papers: Detection of Cosmic Shear from STIS Parallel Archi…
We analyse the joint distribution of dust attenuation and projected axis ratios, together with galaxy size and surface brightness profile information, to infer lessons on the dust content and star/dust geometry within star-forming galaxies…
The STECF Calibration Enhancement effort for the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) aims to improve data calibration via the application of physical modelling techniques. As part of this effort we have developed a model of the STIS…
We report on the detection of cosmic shear on angular scales of 1.3-6.5 arcmin using 45 independent empty fields observed with the Very Large Telescope (VLT). This result confirms previous measurements obtained with the CFH Telescope at the…
A notorious problem in astronomy is the recovery of the true shape and spectral energy distribution (SED) of a galaxy despite attenuation by interstellar dust embedded in the same galaxy. This problem has been solved for a few hundred…
A fundamental assumption in cosmology is that of statistical isotropy - that the universe, on average, looks the same in every direction in the sky. Statistical isotropy has recently been tested stringently using Cosmic Microwave Background…
We discuss the origin of galactic angular momentum, and the statistics of the present day spin distribution. It is expected that the galaxy spin axes are correlated with the intermediate principal axis of the gravitational shear tensor.…
We present a simulation of the spatial, luminosity and spectral distributions of four types of stellar objects. We simulate: (1) Galactic stars, based on a Galactic structure model, a stellar population synthesis model, stellar isochrones,…
Statistics of the weak lensing of galaxies can be used to constrain cosmology if the galaxy shear can be estimated accurately. In general this requires accurate modelling of unlensed galaxy shapes and the point spread function (PSF). I…
Cosmic shear is a powerful method to constrain cosmology, provided that any systematic effects are under control. The intrinsic alignment of galaxies is expected to severely bias parameter estimates if not taken into account. We explore the…
The power spectrum of weak lensing shear caused by large-scale structure is an emerging tool for precision cosmology, in particular for measuring the effects of dark energy on the growth of structure at low redshift. One potential source of…
The Grist project (http://grist.caltech.edu/) is developing a grid-technology based system as a research environment for astronomy with massive and complex datasets. This knowledge extraction system will consist of a library of distributed…
Much of our current understanding of neutral, atomic gas in galaxies comes from radio observations of the nearby Universe. Until the next generation of instruments allow us to push to much higher redshifts, we must rely mostly upon…
As the volume and quality of modern galaxy surveys increase, so does the difficulty of measuring the cosmological signal imprinted in galaxy shapes. Weak gravitational lensing sourced by the most massive structures in the Universe generates…
Using the 2MASS Photometric Redshift catalogue we perform a number of statistical tests aimed at detecting possible departures from statistical homogeneity and isotropy in the large-scale structure of the Universe. Making use of the angular…
The Smithsonian Hectospec Lensing Survey (SHELS) combines a large deep complete redshift survey with a weak lensing map from the Deep Lens Survey (Wittman et al. 2002; 2005). We use maps of the velocity dispersion based on systems…
We present simulations of a cosmic shear survey and show how the survey geometry influences the accuracy of determination of cosmological parameters. We numerically calculate the full covariance matrices Cov of two-point statistics of…
We investigate the impact of statistical and systematic errors on measurements of linear redshift-space distortions (RSD) in future cosmological surveys, analyzing large catalogues of dark-matter halos from the BASICC simulation. These…
If the universe is multiply connected and small the sky shows multiple images of cosmic objects, correlated by the covering group of the 3-manifold used to model it. These correlations were originally thought to manifest as spikes in pair…
The ACS Survey of Globular Clusters has used HST's Wide-Field Channel to obtain uniform imaging of 65 of the nearest globular clusters to provide an extensive homogeneous dataset for a broad range of scientific investigations. The survey…
From May to July 2004, the central radian of the Galactic Plane was scanned by the H.E.S.S. (High Energy Stereoscopic System) telescopes at energies above 200 GeV. This survey was performed from -$3^o$ to +$3^o$ in latitude, for a total of…