Related papers: Pixel lensing observations towards globular cluste…
Context: The number of known strong gravitational lenses is expected to grow substantially in the next few years. The statistical combination of large samples of lenses has the potential of providing strong constraints on the inner…
We investigate the chance of detecting proto-planetary or debris disks in stars that induce microlensing events (lenses). The modification of the light curves shapes due to occultation and extinction by the disks as well as the additional…
We show how observations of multiply-imaged quasars at high redshift can be used as a probe of dark matter clumps (subhalos with masses ~ 10^9 solar masses) within the virialized extent of more massive lensing halos. A large abundance of…
We explore three different methods based on weak lensing to extract cosmological constraints from the large-scale structure. In the first approach (method I), small-scale galaxy lensing measurements of their halo mass provide a constraint…
Recently the Polish-American collaboration OGLE has reported the observation of four possible microlensing events by monitoring, over several months, the brightness of millions of stars in the region of the galactic bulge. If these events…
The observed microlensing events towards the LMC do not have yet a coherent explanation. If they are due to Galactic Halo objects, the nature of these objects is puzzling --- half the halo in dark 0.5 Msol objects. On the other hand,…
[Abridged] We present a comparison between weak-lensing (WL) and X-ray mass estimates of a sample of numerically simulated clusters. The sample consists on the 20 most massive objects at redshift z=0.25 and Mvir > 5 x 10^{14} Msun h^{-1}.…
Weak gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters on faint higher redshift galaxies has been traditionally used to study the cluster mass distribution and as a tool to identify clusters as peaks in the shear maps. However, it becomes soon clear…
A massive foreground cluster lens changes the shapes (shear effect) and number density (magnification effect) of the faint background galaxy population. In this paper we investigate how the shear, magnification and combined information can…
Gravitational microlensing surveys target very dense stellar fields in the local group. As a consequence the microlensed source stars are often blended with nearby unresolved stars. The presence of `blending' is a cause of major uncertainty…
Recent studies of lensing clusters reveal that it might be fairly common for a galaxy cluster that the X-ray center has an obvious offset from its gravitational center which is measured by strong lensing. We argue that if these offsets…
We investigate the clustering of galaxy groups and clusters in the SDSS using the Berlind et al. (2006) group sample, which is designed to identify galaxy systems that each occupy a single dark matter halo. We estimate group masses from…
Stellar mass has been shown to correlate with halo mass, with non-negligible scatter. The stellar mass-size and luminosity-size relationships of galaxies also show significant scatter in galaxy size at fixed stellar mass. It is possible…
We explore the cosmological halo-to-halo scatter of the distribution of mass within dark matter halos utilizing a well-resolved statistical sample of clusters from the cosmological Millennium simulation. We find that at any radius, the…
We propose a novel technique to refine the modelling of galaxy clusters mass distribution using gravitational lensing. The idea is to combine the strengths of both "parametric" and "non-parametric" methods to improve the quality of the fit.…
After a decade of gravitational microlensing experiments, 13 to 17 events by MACHO (depending on quality) and two events by EROS have been detected. All of those have been observed in the direction of Large Magellanic Cloud. We use Evans…
The use of large, X-ray selected galaxy cluster catalogues for cosmological analyses requires a thorough understanding of the X-ray mass estimates. Weak gravitational lensing is an ideal method to shed light on such issues, due to its…
We calculate the expected lensing statistics of the galaxy population in large, low-redshift surveys. Galaxies are modeled using realistic, multiple components: a dark matter halo, a bulge component and disc. We use semi-analytic models of…
Gravitational lensing is potentially able to observe mass-selected halos, and to measure the projected cluster mass function. An optimal mass-selection requires a quantitative understanding of the noise behavior in mass maps. This paper is…
We explore the ability of weak lensing surveys to locate massive clusters. We use both analytic models of dark matter halos and mock weak lensing surveys generated from a large cosmological N-body simulation. The analytic models describe…