Related papers: The Planetary Nebula Luminosity Function
We test whether the peak absolute magnitude Mv(TO) of the Globular Cluster Luminosity Function (GCLF) can be used for reliable extragalactic distance determinations. Starting with the luminosity function of the Galactic Globular Clusters…
Type Ia supernovae (SNe\,Ia) serve as crucial cosmological distance indicators because of their empirical consistency in peak luminosity and characteristic light curve decline rates. These properties facilitate them to be standardized…
Using a slitless spectroscopy method with the 8.2 m Subaru telescope and its FOCAS Cassegrain spectrograph, we have increased the number of planetary nebula (PN) detections and PN velocity measurements in the flattened elliptical galaxy NGC…
The extragalactic background light (EBL) is of fundamental importance both for understanding the entire process of galaxy evolution and for gamma-ray astronomy. However, the overall spectrum of the EBL between 0.1 and 1000 microns has never…
In the era of precision cosmology, it is essential to empirically determine the Hubble constant with an accuracy of one per cent or better. At present, the uncertainty on this constant is dominated by the uncertainty in the calibration of…
With the availability of thousands of type Ia supernovae in the near future the magnitude scatter induced by lensing will become a major issue as it affects parameter estimation. Current N-body simulations are too time consuming to be…
The correlation between the luminosities and rotation velocities of galaxies can be used to estimate distances to late-type galaxies. It is an appropriate moment to re-evaluate this method given the great deal of new information available.…
I-band CCD images of two large regions of the Galactic globular cluster NGC 1261 have been used to construct stellar luminosity functions (LF) for 14000 stars in three annuli from 1.4' from the cluster center to the tidal radius. The LFs…
In this thesis we study the "standardized candle method" using a sample of 37 nearby (redshift < 0.06) Type II-plateau supernovae with BVRI photometry and optical spectroscopy. An analytic procedure is implemented to fit light, color, and…
We measure the rest-frame B-band luminosity function of red-sequence galaxies (RSLF) of five intermediate-redshift (0.5 < z < 0.9), high-mass (sigma > 950 km/s) clusters. Cluster galaxies are identified through photometric redshifts based…
The luminosity function (LF) for stars is here fitted by a Schechter function and by a Gamma probability density function. The dependence of the number of stars on the distance, both in the low and high luminosity regions, requires the…
At large redshifts, a cluster or group may be too distant for the galaxies within the cluster to be detected individually. However, the light from these ``undetected'' galaxies still modulates the surface brightness of the background sky.…
Investigation of spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey reveals the presence of a region of ionized gas of >2 degrees diameter centered approximately at alpha = 10^h 37^m delta = -00^o 18' (J2000) (Galactic coordinates l=248, b=+48).…
We have developed a Monte Carlo method to compute the luminosity function of galaxies, based on photometric redshifts, which takes into account the non-gaussianity of the probability functions, and the presence of degenerate solutions in…
We compute the luminosity function of galaxies in groups. The data consists in two samples of groups of galaxies selected in distance and redshift space comprising a total number of 66 groups. The assignment of galaxies to the groups were…
The Crab Nebula is the only hard X-ray source in the sky that is both bright enough and steady enough to be easily used as a standard candle. As a result, it has been used as a normalization standard by most X-ray/gamma ray telescopes.…
A slab with relative permittivity $\epsilon = - 1 + i\delta$ and permeability $\mu = - 1 + i\delta $ has a critical distance away from the slab where a small particle will either be cloaked or imaged depending on whether it is located…
We present a wide field $V$-band imaging survey of approximately 1 deg$^2$ ($\sim7.2 h^{-2}_{75}$ Mpc$^{2}$) in the direction of the nearby cluster of galaxies Abell 2151 (the Hercules Cluster). The data are used to construct the luminosity…
The deep near-infrared luminosity function of AC118, a cluster of galaxies at z=0.3, is presented. AC118 is a bimodal cluster, as evidenced both by our near-infrared images of lensed galaxies, by public X-ray Rosat images and by the spatial…
The spatial distribution of chemical elements in the Galactic disk provides key constraints on models of galaxy evolution. However, studies using planetary nebulae (PNe) as tracers have been historically limited by large uncertainties in…