Related papers: The Auto-Correlation Function of the extragalactic…
(Abridged) Weak gravitational lensing induces distortions on the images of background galaxies, and thus provides a direct measure of mass fluctuations in the universe. Since the distortions induced by lensing on the images of background…
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…
We develop and test a method for measuring the gravitational lensing induced distortion of faint background galaxies. We first describe how we locate the galaxies and measure a 2-component `polarisation' or ellipticity statistic $e_\alpha$…
The measurement of shape parameters of sources in astronomical images is usually performed by assuming that the underlying noise is uncorrelated. Spatial noise correlation is however present in practice due to various observational effects…
We discuss the galaxy-galaxy-mass three-point correlation function and show how to measure it with weak gravitational lensing. The method entails choosing a large of pairs of foreground lens galaxies and constructing a mean shear map with…
The correlation between cosmic shear as measured by the image distortion of high-redshift galaxies and the number counts of foreground galaxies is calculated. For a given power spectrum of the cosmic density fluctuations, this correlation…
We consider an alternative to the cross-correlation function (CCF), that uses the autocor- relation function (ACF), to measure in spectra the reflected light of the stars by their planetary companion. The objective of this work is to assess…
The information content of the autocorrelation function (ACF) of intensity fluctuations of the X-ray background (XRB) is analyzed. The tight upper limits set by ROSAT deep survey data on the ACF at arcmin scales imply strong constraints on…
Gravitational lensing of background galaxies by intervening matter is a powerful probe of the cosmological model. In the era of Stage IV surveys, contamination from galaxies below the detection threshold has emerged as a significant source…
The robust estimation of the tiny distortions (shears) of galaxy shapes caused by weak gravitational lensing in the presence of much larger shape distortions due to the point-spread function (PSF) has been widely investigated. One major…
Massive clusters of galaxies gravitationally shear the images of faint background galaxies. At large impact parameters the shear is weak, but can still be measured, to a reasonable degree of significance, as a statistical anisotropy of the…
Since gravitational lensing effects directly probe inhomogeneities of dark matter, lensing-galaxy cross-correlations can provide us important information on the relation between dark matter and galaxy distributions, i.e., the bias. In this…
Dedicated 'Stage IV' observatories will soon observe the entire extragalactic sky, to measure the 'cosmic shear' distortion of galaxy shapes by weak gravitational lensing. To measure the apparent shapes of those galaxies, we present an…
We study the possibility of using quadrupole moments of auto-convolved galaxy images to measure cosmic shear. The autoconvolution of an image corresponds to the inverse Fourier transformation of its power spectrum. The new method has the…
It is well known gravitational lensing, mainly via magnification bias, modifies the observed galaxy/quasar clustering. Such discussions have largely focused on the 2D angular correlation. Here and in a companion paper (Paper II) we explore…
The first positive detection of the X-ray background fluctuations at small angular scales is reported. ROSAT PSPC archive pointed observations are used to measure fluctuations at scales of 0.03 - 0.4 deg. The pointings have been selected…
Gravitational waves from inspiraling compact binaries provide direct measurements of luminosity distances and serve as a powerful probe of the high-redshift Universe. In addition to their role as standard sirens, they offer an opportunity…
We present a new shear estimator for weak lensing observations which properly accounts for the effects of a realistic point spread function (PSF). Images of faint galaxies are subject to gravitational shearing followed by smearing with the…
We present the theoretical and analytical bases of optimal techniques to measure weak gravitational shear from images of galaxies. We first characterize the geometric space of shears and ellipticity, then use this geometric interpretation…
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…