Related papers: Reducing the shear
We derive a new relation between cosological distances, valid in any (statistically) isotropic space-time and independent of cosmological parameters or even the validity of the field equation of General Relativity. In particular, this…
Measurement of the gravitational distortion of images of distant galaxies is rapidly becoming established as a powerful probe of the dark mass distribution in clusters of galaxies. With the advent of large mosaics of CCD's these methods…
In strong gravitational lens systems, the light bending is usually dominated by one main galaxy, but may be affected by other mass along the line of sight (LOS). Shear and convergence can be used to approximate the contributions from less…
It is now routine to measure the weak gravitational lensing shear signal from the mean ellipticity of distant galaxies. However, conversion between ellipticity and shear assumes local linearity of the lensing potential (ie that the spatial…
A long standing problem in weak lensing is about how to construct cosmic shear estimators from galaxy images. Conventional methods average over a single quantity per galaxy to estimate each shear component. We show that any such shear…
Gravitational lensing causes a correlation between a population of foreground large-scale structures and the observed number density of the background distant galaxies as a consequence of the flux magnification and the lensing area…
We study how joint shear and magnification measurements improve the statistical precision of weak lensing mass calibration experiments, relative to standard shear-only analysis. For our magnification measurements, we consider not only the…
Weak gravitational lensing is a unique probe of the dark side of the universe: it provides a direct way to map the distribution of dark matter around galaxies, clusters of galaxies and on cosmological scales. Furthermore, the measurement of…
Galaxy shapes are not randomly oriented, rather they are statistically aligned in a way that can depend on formation environment, history and galaxy type. Studying the alignment of galaxies can therefore deliver important information about…
While most strong-gravitational-lensing systems may be roughly modelled by a single massive object between the source and the observer, in the details all the structures near the light path contribute to the observed images. These…
In this paper we introduce a new observable to measure cosmic shear. We show that if we can measure with good accuracy both, the orientation of a galaxy and the polarisation direction of its radio emission, the angle between them is…
In gravitational lensing, the magnification effect changes the luminosity and size of a background galaxy. If the image sizes are not small compared to the scale over which the magnification and shear vary, higher-order distortions occur…
Gravitational lensing by large-scale structure induces weak coherent alignments in the shapes of background galaxies. Here we present evidence for the detection of this `cosmic shear' at the 3.4 sigma significance level with the William…
It is shown which properties of a strong gravitational lens can in principle be recovered from observations of multiple extended images when no assumptions are made about the deflector or sources. The mapping between individual multiple…
We derive expressions, in terms of "polar shapelets", for the image distortion operations associated with weak gravitational lensing. Shear causes galaxy shapes to become elongated, and is sensitive to the second derivative of the projected…
When a luminous source is extended, its distortions by weak gravitational lensing are richer than a mere combination of magnification and shear. In a recent work, we proposed an elegant formalism based on complex analysis to describe and…
Galaxy-galaxy lensing (GGL) measures the 2-point cross-correlation between galaxies and mass in the Universe. In this work we seek to generalise this effect by considering the third-order correlations between galaxies and mass:…
In this brief review I consider the advances made in weak gravitational lensing over the last 8 years, concentrating on the large scales - cosmic shear. I outline the theoretical developments, observational status, and the challenges which…
The analysis of strong lensing images usually involves an external convergence and shear, which are meant to model the effect of perturbations along the line of sight, on top of the main lens. Such a description of line-of-sight…
Studies of weak gravitational lensing by large-scale structures require the measurement of the distortions introduced to the shapes of distant galaxies at the few percent level by anisotropic light deflection along the line of sight. To…