Related papers: Constraints on intergalactic dust from quasar colo…
Measuring the density of the intergalactic medium using quasar sightlines in the epoch of reionization is challenging due to the saturation of Lyman-$\alpha$ absorption. Near a luminous quasar, however, the enhanced radiation creates a…
Recent studies have shown that the observed colour distributions of Type Ia SNe (SNIa) are well-described by a combination of distributions from dust and intrinsic colour. Here we present a new forward-modeling fitting method (Dust2Dust) to…
The impact of quasars on their galaxy neighbours is an important factor in the understanding of galaxy evolution models. The aim of this work is to characterize the intermediate-scale environments of quasars at low redshift (z $<$ 0.2) with…
Interstellar dust appears in a number of roles in the interstellar medium. Historically, the most familiar one is as a source of extinction in the optical. Absorbed optical and ultraviolet light heats the dust, whence infrared (including…
In the standard quasar model, the accretion disk obscuration is due to the canonical dusty torus. Here, we argue that a substantial part of the quasar obscuration can come from the interstellar medium (ISM) when the quasars are embedded in…
Recent optical and submillimeter observations have begun to probe the existence of dust grains in the halos of spiral galaxies. I review our own work in this area which employs high-resolution optical images of edge-on spiral galaxies to…
We have undertaken a search for the infrared emission from the intracluster dust in the Coma cluster of galaxies by the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer. Our observations yield the deepest mid and far-infrared images of a galaxy…
Cosmological analyses with type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) often assume a single empirical relation between color and luminosity ($\beta$) and do not account for varying host-galaxy dust properties. However, from studies of dust in large…
Two groups have recently discovered a statistically significant deviation in the fluxes of high-redshift type Ia supernovae from the predictions of a Friedmann model with zero cosmological constant. In this Letter, I argue that bright,…
We present a new sample of purely near infra-red selected KVega<16.5 extremely red ((J-K)>2.5) quasar candidates at z~2 from 900 sq deg of data in the UKIDSS Large Area Survey (LAS). Five of these are spectroscopically confirmed to be…
Due to the effects of gravitational lensing, the magnification distribution of high redshift supenovae can be a powerful discriminator between smooth dark matter and dark matter consisting of compact objects. We use high resolution N-body…
A majority of quasar surveys have been based on criteria which assume strong blue continua or a UV-excess. Any amount of dust along the line-of-sight is expected to drastically extinguish the optical/UV flux leading to a selection bias.…
We present a forecast of dark energy constraints that could be obtained from a large sample of distances to Type Ia supernovae detected and measured from space. We simulate the supernova events as they would be observed by a EUCLID-like…
The thermal emission of dust is one of the most important tracers of the interstellar medium: multi-wavelength photometry in the far-infrared (FIR) and submillimeter (submm) can be fitted with a model, providing estimates of the dust mass.…
The near infrared extinction powerlaw index ($\beta$) and its uncertainty is derived from three different techniques based on star counts, colour excess and a combination of them. We have applied these methods to 2MASS data to determine…
The observation of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) plays an essential role in probing the expansion history of the universe. But the possible presence of cosmic opacity can degrade the quality of SNe Ia. The gravitational-wave (GW) standard…
To elucidate the dust properties in the SMC we have for the first time measured linear polarization in five colors in the optical region of the spectrum for a sample of reddened stars. For two of these stars, for which there were no…
We derive Galactic continuum spectra from 5-96/cm from COBE/FIRAS observations. The spectra are dominated by warm dust emission, which may be fit with a single temperature in the range 16-21 K (for nu^2 emissivity) along each line of sight.…
We present a synthesis of the astronomical observations constraining the wavelength-dependent extinction, emission, and polarization from interstellar dust from UV to microwave wavelengths on diffuse Galactic sightlines. Representative…
We present a detailed analysis of a red quasar at z=2.32 with an intervening damped Lyman-alpha absorber (DLA) at z=2.13. Using high quality data from the X-shooter spectrograph at ESO Very Large Telescope we find that the absorber has a…