Related papers: Rethinking Lensing and Lambda
By directly probing mass distributions, gravitational lensing offers several new tests of the CDM paradigm. Lens statistics place upper limits on the dark matter content of elliptical galaxies. Galaxies built from CDM mass distributions are…
Upcoming ground and space based observatories such as the DES, the LSST, the JDEM concepts and the SKA, promise to dramatically increase the size of strong gravitational lens samples. A significant fraction of the systems are expected to be…
Over the past decade advancements in the understanding of several astrophysical phenomena have allowed us to infer a concordance cosmological model that successfully accounts for most of the observations of our universe. This has opened up…
Propagation of light in the universe with structure which amplify and modify the shape of distant galaxies, producing a correlation between nearby and distant density of galaxies, is a phenomena very important in cosmology for determining…
In this paper, we assemble a well-defined sample of early-type gravitational lenses extracted from a large collection of 158 systems, and use the redshift distribution of galactic-scale lenses to test the standard cosmological model…
We investigate how observations of strong lensing can be used to infer cosmological parameters, in particular the equation of state of dark energy. We focus on the growth of the critical lines of lensing clusters with the source redshift as…
We study moderate gravitational lensing where a background galaxy is magnified substantially, but not multiply imaged, by an intervening galaxy. We focus on the case where both the lens and source are elliptical galaxies. The signatures of…
We study the effects of strong lensing on the observed number counts of mm sources using a ray tracing simulation and two number count models of unlensed sources. We employ a quantitative treatment of maximum attainable magnification factor…
We study the impact of the often neglected lensing contribution to galaxy number counts on the $E_g$ statistics which is used to constrain deviations from GR. This contribution affects both the galaxy-galaxy and the convergence-galaxy…
We use the statistics of strong gravitational lensing from the CLASS survey to impose constraints on the velocity dispersion and density profile of elliptical galaxies. This approach differs from much recent work, where the luminosity…
A large number of cosmological studies now suggest that roughly two-thirds of the critical energy density of the Universe exists in a component with negative pressure. If the equation of state of such an energy component varies with time,…
Strong gravitational lensing provides an independent measurement of the Hubble parameter ($H_0$). One remaining systematic is a bias from the additional mass due to a galaxy group at the lens redshift or along the sightline. We quantify…
Extensive analyses of statistical strong gravitational lensing are performed based on the final Cosmic Lens All Sky Survey (CLASS) well-defined statistical sample of flat spectrum radio sources and current estimates of galaxy luminosity…
The light we observe from distant astrophysical objects including supernovae and quasars allows us to determine large distances in terms of a cosmological model. Despite the success of the standard cosmological model in fitting the data,…
We investigate observational constraints from lensing statistics and high-z type Ia supernovae on flat cosmological models with nonrelativistic matter and an exotic fluid with equation of state, $p_x=(m/3 -1)\rho_x$. We show that agreement…
Foreground galaxies that amplify the light from background quasars may also dim that light if the galaxies contain enough dust. Extinction by dust in lenses could hide the large number of lensed systems predicted for a flat universe with a…
An analysis of null geodesics in Schwarzschild de Sitter space is presented with special attention to their global `bending angles', local measurable angles, and the involvement of the cosmological constant. We make use of a general…
Several recent studies show that bright, intermediate and high redshift optically and radio selected QSOs are positively correlated with nearby galaxies on a range of angular scales up to a degree. Obscuration by unevenly distributed…
The cosmological constant Lambda affects gravitational lensing phenomena. The contribution of Lambda to the observable angular positions of multiple images and to their amplification and time delay is here computed through a study in the…
Recent observations suggest appreciable star formation activity in early-type galaxies down to redshift $z\sim 0.5$. If so, there is likely to be dust in these galaxies. We consider the possibility that obscuration by dust can reconcile the…