Related papers: Direct Extragalactic Distance Determination Using …
Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) offer a potential way to extend the Hubble diagram to very high redshifts and to constrain the nature of dark energy in a way complementary to distant type Ia supernovae. However, gravitational lensing systematically…
Normal galaxies are faint and complex X-ray sources that provide very powerful probes for fundamental astrophysical questions. Examples include: the study of populations of X-ray emitting sources; the study of the entire spectrum of…
We report the most accurate X-ray position of the X-ray source in the giant globular cluster G1 in M31 by using the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). G1 is clearly detected…
The recent confirmation that at least some gamma-ray bursters (GRBs) are indeed at cosmological distances raises the possibility that observations of these could provide interesting constraints on the fundamental laws of physics. Here we…
We have spatially and spectrally resolved the sources of X-ray emission from the X-ray faint S0 galaxy NGC 1553 using an observation from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The majority (70%) of the emission in the 0.3 - 10.0 keV band is…
X-ray emission can provide a crucial diagnostic of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). We calculate the X-ray and gamma-ray spectra of impulsive acceleration episodes related to GRB pulses. We use the synchrotron shock model (SSM) as a basis of our…
Deep X-ray surveys have shown that the cosmic X-ray background (XRB) is largely due to the accretion onto supermassive black holes, integrated over cosmic time. The ROSAT, Chandra and XMM-Newton satellites have resolved more than 80% of the…
We test the predictions of Emergent Gravity using matter densities of relaxed, massive clusters of galaxies using observations from optical and X-ray wavebands. We improve upon previous work in this area by including the baryon mass…
Thanks to the outstanding capabilites of the HST, our current knowledge about the M31 globular clusters (GCs) is similar to our knowledge of the Milky Way GCs in the 1960s-1970s, which set the basis for studying the halo and galaxy…
We use archival Chandra X-ray Observatory data to investigate X-ray emission from early-type galaxies in the rich z=0.06 cluster Abell 3128. By combining the X-ray count-rates from an input list of optically-selected galaxies, we obtain a…
We present an accurate X-ray position of the massive globular cluster G1 by using XMM-Newton and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The X-ray emission of G1 has been detected recently with XMM-Newton. There are two possibilities for the…
The X-ray emission from clusters of galaxies enables them to be used as good cosmological probes and as an example for massive galaxy formation. The gas mass fraction in clusters should be a universal standard which by means of Chandra…
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) produce a dominant fraction (~80%) of the Soft X-ray background (SXB) at photon energies 0.5<E<2 keV. If dust pervaded throughout the intergalactic medium, its scattering opacity would have produced diffuse…
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are perfect laboratories to check General Relativity (GR) effects by using Broad Line Region (BLR) clouds eclipses to probe the innermost regions of the accretion disk. A new relativistic X-ray spectral model…
Young stars are surrounded by copious amounts of circumstellar material. Its composition, in particular its gas-to-dust ratio, is an important parameter. However, measuring this ratio is challenging, because gas mass estimates are often…
We study the prospects for detecting gamma-rays from decaying Dark Matter (DM), focusing in particular on gravitino DM in R-parity breaking vacua. Given the substantially different angular distribution of the predicted gamma-ray signal with…
The question of the X-ray background has been largely settled over the last 10 years using the ROSAT satellite. About 70-80 % of the soft X-ray background was resolved into discrete sources, which are mainly X-ray and optically unobscured…
Improving angular resolution is one of X-ray astronomy's big challenges. While X-ray interferometry should eventually vastly improve broad-band angular resolution, in the near-term, X-ray telescopes will sacrifice angular resolution for…
Blue Supergiants (BSGs) are the brightest stars in the universe at visual light with absolute magnitudes up to Mv=-10 mag. They are ideal stellar objects for the determination of extragalactic distances, in particular, because the perennial…
The cosmological constraining power of modern galaxy cluster catalogs can be improved by obtaining low-scatter mass proxy measurements for even a small fraction of sources. In the context of large upcoming surveys that will reveal the…