Related papers: Are High-Redshift Quasars Blurry?
We investigate a distortion in redshift-space which causes galaxies to appear to lie in walls concentric about the observer, forming a rough bull's-eye pattern. We simulate what an observer would see in a thin slice of redshift-space,…
Future lensing surveys will be nearly full-sky and reach an unprecedented depth, probing scales closer and closer to the Hubble radius. This motivates the study of the cosmic shear beyond the small-angle approximation and including general…
If the unexpectedly high frequency of quasar pairs with very different component redshifts is due to the lensing of a population of background quasars by the foreground quasar, typical lens masses must be $\sim10^{12}M_{\sun}$ and the sum…
Present day estimates of the Hubble constant based on Cepheids and on the cosmic microwave background radiation are uncertain by roughly 10% (on the conservative assumption that the universe may not be PERFECTLY flat). Gravitational lens…
Lyman alpha emission presents a means of identifying very high redshift galaxies, provided such objects can be reliably distinguished from foreground emission-line galaxies. Here we report on a program of imaging and spectroscopic studies…
We examine the 2008-2016 gamma-ray and optical light curves of a number of bright Fermi blazars. In a fraction of them, the periodograms show possible evidence of quasi-periodicities related in the two bands. This coincidence strengthens…
Fuzzy dark matter is a promising alternative to the standard cold dark matter. It has quite recently been noticed, that they can not only successfully explain the large-scale structure in the Universe, but can also solve problems of…
Gravitational lensing will cause a dispersion in the Hubble diagram for high redshift sources. This effect will introduce a bias in the cosmological parameter determination using the distance-redshift relation for Type Ia supernovae. In…
Reexamination of the amplitude ratios of the photometric and radial velocity changes of Blazhko RRab stars in their different Blazhko phases shows that a normal amplitude ratio occurs near the phase of maximum amplitude. Checking the…
We investigate the extent to which correlated distortions of the luminosity distance-redshift relation due to large-scale bulk flows limit the precision with which cosmological parameters can be measured. In particular, peculiar velocities…
We investigate the luminosity and redshift dependence of the quasar continuum by means of composite spectrum using a large non-BAL radio-quiet quasar sample drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Quasar continuum slopes in the UV-Opt band…
We propose that interstellar extreme scattering events, usually observed as pulsar scintillations, may be caused by a coherent agent rather than the usually assumed turbulence of $\rm H_2$ clouds. We find that the penetration of a flux of…
Galactic dust emission is polarized at unexpectedly high levels, as revealed by Planck. The origin of the observed $\simeq 20\%$ polarization fractions can be identified by characterizing the properties of optical starlight polarization in…
We quantify quasar color-variability using an unprecedented variability database - ugriz photometry of 9093 quasars from SDSS Stripe 82, observed over 8 years at ~60 epochs each. We confirm previous reports that quasars become bluer when…
Astronomers occasionally detect an object having unexpected shape, unexplainable photometry, or unprecedented spectra that are inconsistent with our contemporary knowledge of the universe. Upon careful assessment, many of these anomalies…
A tangential distortion of background source galaxies around foreground lens galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field is detected at the 99.3% confidence level. An important element of our analysis is the use of photometric redshifts to determine…
Wave effects in lensing form a rich phenomenon at the intersection of classical caustic singularities and quantum interference, yet are notoriously difficult to model. A large number of recently observed pulsars and fast radio bursts in…
Weak-lensing distortions of the cosmic-microwave-background (CMB) temperature and polarization patterns can reveal important clues to the intervening large-scale structure. The effect of lensing is to deflect the primary temperature and…
Based on a new sample of 355 quasars with significant optical polarization and using complementary statistical methods, we confirm that quasar polarization vectors are not randomly oriented over the sky with a probability often in excess of…
The cold dark matter scenario of hierarchical large-scale structure formation predicts the existence of abundant subhalos around large galaxies. However, the number of observed dwarf galaxies is far from this theoretical prediction,…