Related papers: Using bright ellipticals as dark energy cosmic clo…
We study the effect of a phenomenological parameterized quintessence model on low, intermediate and high redshift observations. At low and intermediate redshifts, we use the Gold sample of supernova Type Ia (SNIa) data and recently observed…
We present a detailed stellar population analysis of 27 massive elliptical galaxies within 4 very rich clusters at redshift z~0.2: A115, A655, A963 and A2111. Using the new, high-resolution stellar populations models developed in our group,…
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 use 21 Hubble parameter versus redshift data points, from Gazta\~{n}aga et al. (2009), Stern et al. (2010), and Moresco et al. (2012), to place constraints on model parameters of constant and time-evolving dark energy cosmologies. This…
We present a new technique to determine age and metallicity of old stellar populations (globular clusters and elliptical galaxies) using an iterative principal component analysis on narrow band (Str\"omgren) colors. Our technique is capable…
I summarize in terms of evolutionary population synthesis models our current understanding of stellar populations in different environments, from star clusters in nearby galaxies to distant galaxies in clusters or seen through gravitational…
We generalize the small scale dynamics of the universe by taking into account models with an equation of state which evolves with time, and provide a complete formulation of the cluster virialization attempting to address the nonlinear…
Aims. We investigate the degree of improvement in dark energy constraints that can be achieved by extending Type Ia Supernova (SN Ia) samples to redshifts z > 1.5 with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), particularly in the ongoing CANDELS…
Gravitational wave signals from coalescing Massive Black Hole (MBH) binaries could be used as standard sirens to measure cosmological parameters. The future space based gravitational wave observatory Laser Interferometer Space Antenna…
Galaxy cluster surveys provide a powerful means of studying the density and nature of the dark energy. The redshift distribution of detected clusters in a deep, large solid angle SZE or X-ray survey is highly sensitive to the dark energy…
We present a detailed stellar population analysis of 27 massive elliptical galaxies within 4 very rich clusters at redshift z~0.2. We obtained accurate estimates of the mean luminosity-weighted ages and relative abundances of CN, Mg and Fe…
These lecture notes intend to form a short pedagogical introduction to the use of typical type Ia-Supernovae (hereafter SNIa) as standard candles to determine the energy density of the universe. Problems of principle for taking SNIa as…
One of the most compelling goals of observational cosmology is the characterisation of the properties of the dark energy component thought to be responsible for the recent acceleration of the universe, including its possible dynamics. In…
We examine the prospects for measuring the dark energy equation of state parameter w within the context of any uncertain redshift evolution of galaxy cluster structure (building on Majumdar and Mohr, 2003) and show that including the…
We present a Bayesian approach to combine $Planck$ data and the X-ray physical properties of the intracluster medium in the virialization region of a sample of 320 galaxy clusters ($0.056<z<1.24$, $kT>3$ keV) observed with $Chandra$. We…
We perform an anisotropic clustering analysis of 1,133,326 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) Data Release (DR) 12 covering the redshift range $0.15<z<0.69$. The geometrical…
We have fitted the surface brightness of a sample of 79 elliptical galaxies pertaining to the Coma cluster of galaxies using the Sersic profile. This model is defined through three primary parameters: scale length (a), intensity (\Sigma_0),…
Constraining the dark energy equation of state, $w_x(z)$, is one of the main issues of current and future cosmological surveys. In practice, this requires making assumptions about the evolution of $w_x$ with redshift $z$, which can be…
We use the Allen et al. (2008) galaxy cluster gas mass fraction versus redshift data to constrain parameters of three different dark energy models: a cosmological constant dominated one ($\Lambda$CDM); the XCDM parameterization of dark…
We investigate whether future measurements of high redshift standard candles (HzSCs) will be a powerful probe of dark energy, when compared to other types of planned dark energy measurements. Active galactic nuclei and gamma ray bursts have…