Related papers: Globular Cluster Microlensing: Globular Clusters a…
A high optical depth to gravitational microlensing towards the galactic bulge is consistent with current models of the galactic bar. The low optical depth towards the LMC can probably be accounted for by the ordinary stars in our galaxy and…
Clusters of galaxies are used in a variety of ways to do cosmology. Some of them are presented here. Their X-ray emitting gas allows us to determine the baryon fraction, dark matter distribution and the matter density $\Omega_{m}$ of the…
I critically review a methodology of using clusters of galaxies as cosmological probes. The understanding of the abundances and spatial correlations of dark matter halos has been significantly advanced especially for a last few years.…
In this talk I review some of the key questions that weak lensing observations of clusters can potentially answer, and sketch the progress that has been made to date in extracting quantitative estimates of masses and density profiles. A…
The microlensing surveys MACHO, EROS, MOA and OGLE (hereafter called MEMO) have searched for microlensing toward the Large Magellanic Cloud for a cumulated duration of 27 years. We study the potential of joining these databases to search…
We describe a new method to search for gravitational microlensing toward the Galactic bulge that employs a small camera rather than a conventional telescope and probes new regions of parameter space. The small aperture (~65 mm) permits…
Gravitational lensing by clusters of galaxies has been detected on scales ranging from $\sim10^{-1}$ Mpc to $\sim10$ Mpc, namely, arcs/arclets, weak lensing and quasar-cluster associations. This allows us to derive an overall radius matter…
Globular clusters are highly efficient radio pulsar factories. These pulsars can be used as precision probes of the clusters' structure, gas content, magnetic field, and formation history; some of them are also highly interesting in their…
Globular clusters are large and dense agglomerate of stars. At variance with smaller clusters of stars, they exhibit signs of some chemical evolution. At least for this reason, they are intermediate between open clusters and massive objects…
Globular clusters provide a unique probe of galaxy formation and evolution. Here I briefly summarize the known observational properties of globular cluster systems. One re-occurring theme is that the globular cluster systems of spirals and…
The position of the giant elliptical galaxy M87 at the center of the Virgo Cluster means that the inferred column density of dark matter associated with both the cluster halo and the galaxy halo is quite large. This system is thus an…
Galaxy clusters can act as gravitational lenses to magnify the universe behind them, allowing us to see deep into the early universe. The Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields program (Lotz et al. 2017) uses six galaxy clusters imaged by…
Despite consistent progress in numerical simulations, the observable properties of galaxy clusters are difficult to predict ab initio. It is therefore important to compare both theoretical and observational results to a direct measure of…
Globular star clusters are extremely important astrophysical objects since (1) they are prime laboratories for testing stellar evolution; (2) they are ``fossils'' from the epoch of galaxy formation, and thus important cosmological tools;…
A promising route for revealing the existence of dark matter structures on mass scales smaller than the faintest galaxies is through their effect on strong gravitational lenses. We examine the role of local, lens-proximate clustering in…
Clusters of galaxies need to be investigated using complementary approaches combining all currently available observational techniques (X-ray, gravitational lensing, dynamics, SZ) on homogeneous samples if one wants to understand their…
Deep imaging data from the Keck II telescope are employed to study the globular cluster (GC) populations in the cores of six rich Abell clusters. The sample includes A754, A1644, A2124, A2147, A2151, and A2152, and spans the redshift range…
Intra-Cluster Machos (ICMs) are a plausible candidate for at least some of the dark matter in clusters of galaxies. ICMs can be detected by searching toward M87 for ``pixel lensing'', gravitational microlensing of unresolved stars.…
Luminous stars in background galaxies straddling the lensing caustic of a foreground galaxy cluster can be individually detected due to extreme magnification factors of $\sim 10^2$--$10^3$, as recently observed in deep HST images. We…
Much interest has been generated recently by the ongoing MACHO, EROS and OGLE projects to identify gravitationally lensed stars from the Large Magellanic Cloud and Galactic bulge, and the positive identification of several events (Alcock et…