Related papers: The Auto-Correlation Function of the extragalactic…
Weak gravitational lensing studies aim to measure small distortions in the shapes of distant galaxies, and thus place very tight demands on the understanding of detector-induced systematic effects in astronomical images. The Wide-Field…
We propose to measure the weak cosmic shear using the spatial derivatives of the galaxy surface brightness field. The measurement should be carried out in Fourier space, in which the point spread function (PSF) can be transformed to a…
Large scale correlations in the orientations of galaxies can result from alignments in their angular momentum vectors. These alignments arise from the tidal torques exerted on neighboring proto-galaxies by the smoothly varying shear field.…
Cosmic shear is a powerful method to constrain cosmology, provided that any systematic effects are under control. The intrinsic alignment of galaxies is expected to severely bias parameter estimates if not taken into account. We explore the…
Weak gravitational lensing provides a unique method to directly measure the distribution of mass in the universe. Because the distortions induced by lensing in the shape of background galaxies are small, the measurement of weak lensing…
With the recent detection of cosmic shear, the most challenging effect of weak gravitational lensing has been observed. The main difficulties for this detection were the need for a large amount of high quality data and the control of…
Different options can be used in order to measure the shear from observations in the context of weak lensing. Here we introduce new methods where the isotropy assumption for the distribution of the source galaxies is implemented directly on…
The nature of the dark matter remains a mystery. The possibility of an unstable dark matter particle decaying to invisible daughter particles has been explored many times in the past few decades. Meanwhile, weak gravitational lensing shear…
There has been much recent interest in studying anisotropies in the astrophysical gravitational-wave (GW) background, as these could provide us with interesting new information about galaxy clustering and large-scale structure. However,…
Only galaxies bright enough and large enough to be unambiguously identified and measured are included in galaxy surveys used to estimate cosmic shear. We demonstrate that because gravitational lensing can scatter galaxies across the…
We present the first detection of weak gravitational shear at infrared wavelengths, using observations of the lensing cluster Abell 1689, taken with the SofI camera on the ESO-NTT telescope. The imprint of cluster lenses on the shapes of…
We discuss spatial fluctuations in the gravitational wave background arising from unresolved Galactic binary sources, such as close white dwarf binaries, due to the fact the galactic binary source distribution is anisotropic. We introduce a…
Cosmic shear leads to a correlation of the observed ellipticities of galaxies, an effect which is used to place constraints on cosmological parameters, and to explore the evolution of dark matter and dark energy in the universe. However, a…
Since cosmic shear was first observed in 2000, it has become a key cosmological probe and promises to deliver exquisite dark energy constraints. However, shear is inferred from coherent distortions of galaxy shapes, and the relation between…
We propose a novel method to detect cosmic magnification signals by cross-correlating foreground convergence fields constructed from galaxy shear measurements with background galaxy positional distributions, namely shear-number density…
Decaying dark matter particles could be indirectly detected as an excess over a simple power law in the energy spectrum of the diffuse extragalactic gamma-ray background. Furthermore, since the Earth is not located at the center of the…
This paper details a description of the pattern of galaxy image distortion over the entire sky caused by the gravitational lensing which is the result of large scale inhomogeneities in our universe. We present a tensor spherical harmonic…
We develop a new method to estimate gravitational shear by adopting an elliptical weight function to measure background galaxy images. In doing so, we introduce a new concept of "zero plane" which is an imaginal source plane where shapes of…
Power spectra and cross-correlation measurements from the weak gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the cosmic shearing of faint galaxies images will help shed light on quantities hidden from the CMB…
The systematic magnification of background sources by the weak gravitational-lensing effects of foreground matter, also called cosmic magnification, is becoming an efficient tool both for measuring cosmological parameters and for exploring…