Related papers: Gravitational Lensing & Stellar Dynamics
Gravitational lensing is a powerful tool for constraining substructure in the mass distribution of galaxies, be it from the presence of dark matter sub-halos or due to physical mechanisms affecting the baryons throughout galaxy evolution.…
We propose a new technique to reconstruct non-parametrically the projected mass distribution of galaxy clusters from their gravitational lens effect on background galaxies. The beauty of our technique, is that it combines information from…
I present an overview of strong and weak gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters. After briefly introducing the principles of gravitational lensing, I discuss the main lessons learned from lensing on the mass distribution in clusters and…
Strong gravitational lenses provide unique laboratories for cosmological and astrophysical investigations, but they must first be discovered - a task that can be met with significant contamination by other astrophysical objects and…
The distance-redshift relation plays a fundamental role in constraining cosmological models. In this paper, we show that measurements of positions and time delays of strongly lensed images of a background galaxy, as well as those of the…
The gravitational lens configuration where a background galaxy is closely aligned with a foreground galaxy, can provide accurate measurement of the dark matter density profile in the foreground galaxy, free of dynamical assumptions.…
The unknown nature of dark energy motivates continued cosmological tests of large-scale gravitational physics. We present a new consistency check based on the relative amplitude of non-relativistic galaxy peculiar motions, measured via…
Strong gravitational lensing provides a geometric probe of cosmology in a unique manner through distance ratios involving the source and lens. This is well known for the time delay distance derived from measured delays between lightcurves…
Most gravitational lenses are early-type galaxies in relatively low density environments -- a ``field'' rather than a ``cluster'' population. We show that field early-type galaxies with 0 < z < 1, as represented by the lens galaxies, lie on…
Mass clumps in gravitational lens galaxies can perturb lensed images in characteristic ways. Strong lens flux ratios have been used to constrain the amount of dark matter substructure in lens galaxies, and various other observables have…
The mass distribution in massive elliptical galaxies encodes their evolutionary history, thus providing an avenue to constrain the baryonic astrophysics in their evolution. The power-law assumption for the radial mass profile in ellipticals…
In this paper we compare two different diagnostics for estimating stellar masses in early-type galaxies and we establish their level of reliability. In particular, we consider the well-studied sample of 15 field elliptical galaxies selected…
According to the theory of general relativity, masses deflect light in a way similar to convex glass lenses. This gravitational lensing effect is astigmatic, giving rise to image distortions. These distortions allow to quantify cosmic…
We study the effect of the cosmological constant on the statistical properties of gravitational lenses in flat cosmologies (Omega_{0}+lambda_{0} = 1). It is shown that some of the lens observables are strongly affected by the cosmological…
The weak gravitational lensing of high redshift type Ia supernovae has the potential of probing the structure of matter on galaxy halo scales. This is complementary to the weak lensing of galaxies which probes structure of larger scales.…
[Abridged] Many current and future astronomical surveys will rely on samples of strong gravitational lens systems to draw conclusions about galaxy mass distributions. We use a new strong lensing pipeline (presented in Paper I of this…
We report the serendipitous discovery of two strong gravitational lens candidates (ACS J160919+6532 and ACS J160910+6532) in deep images obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope, each less than 40 arcsec…
The gravitational lensing effect is one of the most promising tools for cosmology. Indeed it probes directly the total mass distribution in large-scale structures and can as well provide valuable informations on the values of the density…
By directly probing mass distributions, gravitational lensing offers several new tests of the CDM paradigm. Lens statistics place upper limits on the dark matter content of elliptical galaxies. Galaxies built from CDM mass distributions are…
We propose a new technique, which we call the lens parallax method, to determine simultaneously the redshift distribution of the faint blue galaxies and the mass distributions of foreground clusters of galaxies. The method is based on…