Related papers: Cloudshine: New Light on Dark Clouds

In the past four decades a new type of astronomy has emerged, where instead of looking up into the sky "telescopes" are buried miles underground or deep under water or ice and search not for photons (that is, light), but rather for…

Infrared Dark Clouds (IRDCs) are dark clouds seen in silhouette in mid-infrared surveys. They are thought to be the birthplace of massive stars, yet remarkably little information exists on the properties of the population as a whole (e.g.…

Knowledge of the structure of galaxy clusters is essential for an understanding of large scale structure in the universe, and may provide important clues to the nature of dark matter. Moreover, the shape of the dark matter distribution in…

Analysing the weak lensing distortions of the images of faint background galaxies provides a means to constrain the average mass distribution of cluster galaxies and potentially to test the extent of their dark matter haloes as a function…

Context. The properties of dust grains, in particular their size distribution, are expected to differ from the interstellar medium to the high-density regions within molecular clouds. Since the extinction at near-infrared wavelengths is…

Particles have tremendous potential as astronomical messengers, and conversely, studying the universe as a whole also teaches us about particle physics. This thesis encompasses both of these research directions. Many models predict a…

Galaxy clusters as gravitational lenses play a unique role in astrophysics and cosmology: they permit mapping the dark matter distribution on a range of scales; they reveal the properties of high and intermediate redshift background…

This study introduces a novel method to investigate in-situ light transport within optically thick ensembles of cold atoms, exploiting the internal structure of alkaline-earth metals. A method for creating an optical excitation at the…

Galaxies are biased tracers of the underlying cosmic web, which is dominated by dark matter components that cannot be directly observed. The relationship between dark matter density fields and galaxy distributions can be sensitive to…

Many dense interstellar clouds are observable in emission in the near-IR, commonly referred to as "Cloudshine", and in the mid-IR, the so-called "Coreshine". These C-shine observations have usually been explained with grain growth but no…

It is proposed to search for scintillation of extragalactic sources through the last unknown baryonic structures. Appropriate observation of the scintillation process described here should allow one to detect column density stochastic…

We present a means of characterizing and removing internal reflections between the CCD and other optical surfaces in an astronomical camera. The stellar reflections appear as out-of-focus images and are not necessarily axisymmetric about…

A new method for measuring gravitational lensing with high redshift type Ia supernovae is investigated. The method utilizes correlations between foreground galaxies and supernova brightnesses to substantially reduce possible systematic…

We have created a map of the large-scale infrared surface brightness in excess of that associated with the atomic interstellar medium, using region-by-region correlations between the far-infrared and 21-cm line surface brightness. Our study…

We have created new dust temperature and column density maps of Perseus, Ophiuchus and Serpens using 60 and 100 micron data from the IRIS recalibration of IRAS data. We describe an optimized method for finding the dust temperature,…

We explore the relation between diffuse intracluster light (central galaxy included) and the galaxy cluster (baryonic and dark) matter distribution using a sample of 528 clusters at $0.2\leq z \leq 0.35$ found in the Dark Energy Survey…

The cold dark matter picture predicts an abundance of substructure within the Galactic halo. However, most substructures host no stars and can only be detected indirectly. Stellar streams present a promising probe of this dark substructure.…

(Abridged) We use 8 micron Spitzer GLIMPSE images to make extinction maps of 10 IRDCs, selected to be relatively nearby and massive. The extinction mapping technique requires modeling the IR background intensity behind the cloud, which is…

We propose a new approach for measuring the mass profile and shape of groups and clusters of galaxies, which uses lensing magnification of distant background galaxies. The main advantage of lensing magnification is that, unlike lensing…

We explore how diffuse stellar light and globular clusters (GCs) can be used to trace the matter distribution of their host halo using an observational methodology. For this, we use 117 simulated dark matter (DM) haloes from the $(34.4~\rm…