Related papers: Are High-Redshift Quasars Blurry?
Massive structures, such as galaxies, act as strong gravitational lenses on background sources. When the background source is a quasar, several lensed images are seen, as magnified or de-magnified versions of the same object. The detailed…
In previous studies we have shown that the optical variability of quasars increases, on average, with redshift. We explained this dependance in terms of a hardening of the spectrum during bright phases, coupled with the increase of the…
Fluctuations in the brightness of the background radiation can lead to confusion with real point sources. Such background emission confusion will be important for infrared observations with relatively large beam sizes since the amount of…
We investigate the spectro-photometric variability of quasars due to lensing of small mass substructure (from several tens to several hundreds solar masses). The aim of this paper is to explore the milli/microlensing influence on the flux…
We present our study on cosmic opacity, which relates to changes in photon number as photons travel from the source to the observer. Cosmic opacity may be caused by absorption/scattering due to matter in the universe, or by extragalactic…
The intimate geometry of space-time is expected to suffer stochastic fluctuations as a result of quantum gravitational effects. These fluctuations may induce observable consequences on the propagation of high energy particles over large…
High redshift sources suffer from magnification or demagnification due to weak gravitational lensing by large scale structure. One consequence of this is that the distance-redshift relation, in wide use for cosmological tests, suffers…
Strong gravitational lensing provides a powerful means for studying faint galaxies in the distant universe. By magnifying the apparent brightness of background sources, massive clusters enable the detection of galaxies fainter than the…
A new kind of quantum indeterminacy of transverse position is shown to arise from quantum degrees of freedom of spacetime, based on the assumption that classical trajectories can be defined no better than the diffraction limit of Planck…
Strong gravitational lensing offers constraints on the Hubble constant that are independent of other methods. However, those constraints are subject to uncertainties in lens models. Previous studies suggest that using an elliptical power…
Cluster gravitational lensing surveys like the Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields survey will detect distant galaxies 10-50 times fainter than any yet discovered. Using these surveys to measure the luminosity function of such faint,…
The non-resonant conversion of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) photons into scalar as well as light pseudoscalar particles such as axion-like particles (ALPs) in the presence of turbulent magnetic fields can cause a unique, spatially…
The time delays of gravitationally lensed quasars are generally believed to be unique numbers whose measurement is limited only by the quality of the light curves and the models for the contaminating contribution of gravitational…
It is becoming clear that luminous extragalactic X-ray and sub-mm sources are essentially distinct populations. Thus, if high redshift sub-mm sources represent massive spheroids in formation, there must be a time lag between the major epoch…
The large-scale structure of high-redshift galaxies produces correlated anisotropy in the far-infrared background (FIRB). In regions of the sky where the thermal emission from Galactic dust is well below average, these high-redshift…
Recent observations suggest appreciable star formation activity in early-type galaxies down to redshift $z\sim 0.5$. If so, there is likely to be dust in these galaxies. We consider the possibility that obscuration by dust can reconcile the…
Trajectories of photons of cosmic microwave background (CMB) from the surface of last scattering to us could be deflected by extremely low frequency primordial gravitational wave (PGW). With large scale structure (LSS) producing a smoothing…
The presence of matter in the path of relic photons causes distortions in the angular pattern of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature fluctuations, modifying their properties in a slight but measurable way. Recently, the Planck…
Astronomical or cosmological redshifts are an observable property of extragalactic objects and have historically been wholly attributed to the recessional velocity of that object. The question of other, or intrinsic, components of the…
The curved spacetime induced by gravitational waves can give rise to visual effects such as geometric distortions and redshift structures in the observed image. By establishing a mapping from the object's surface coordinates to the…