Related papers: Dark Galaxies -- the Dominant Population?
This paper reviews statistical methods recently developed to reconstruct and analyze dark matter mass maps from weak lensing observations. The field of weak lensing is motivated by the observations made in the last decades showing that the…
The weak gravitational lensing of high redshift type Ia supernovae has the potential of probing the structure of matter on galaxy halo scales. This is complementary to the weak lensing of galaxies which probes structure of larger scales.…
Gravitational lensing has become one of the most interesting tools to study the mass distribution in the Universe. Since gravitational light deflection is independent of the nature and state of the matter, it is ideally suited to…
The Cold Dark Matter theory of gravitationally-driven hierarchical structure formation has earned its status as a paradigm by explaining the distribution of matter over large spans of cosmic distance and time. However, its central tenet,…
We present the distribution of luminous and dark matter in a set of strong lensing (early-type) galaxies. By combining two independent techniques - stellar population synthesis and gravitational lensing - we can compare the baryonic and…
Gravitational lensing can amplify the apparent brightness of distant sources. Images that are highly magnified are often part of multiply-imaged systems, but we consider the possibility of having large magnifications without additional…
The last decade has shown a considerable development of gravitational lensing for cosmology because it probes the amount and the nature of dark matter, and provides information on the density parameter $\Omega$, the cosmological constant…
Recent observations show a population of active galaxies with milliarcseconds offsets between optical and radio emission. Such offsets can be an indication of extreme phenomena associated with supermassive black holes including relativistic…
Compact groups of galaxies have posed a number of challenging questions. Intensive observational and theoretical studies are now providing answers to many of these, and at the same time, are revealing unexpected new clues about the nature…
Weak gravitational lensing of distant galaxies by foreground structures has proven to be a powerful tool to study the mass distribution in the universe. Nowadays, attention has shifted from clusters of galaxies to the statistical properties…
While dark matter (DM) makes up roughly 80% of the total matter in the Universe, its microscopic properties remain one of the biggest questions in Cosmology today. Fortunately, those properties dictate the distribution and form of…
The evidence of the phenomenon for which, in galaxies, the gravitating mass is distributed differently than the luminous mass, increases as new data become available. Furthermore, this discrepancy is well structured and it depends on the…
Gravitational lensing of a quasar by a spiral galaxy should often be accompanied by damped Lyman-alpha absorption and dust extinction due to the intervening gaseous disk. In nearly edge-on configurations, the surface mass density of the gas…
Galaxies are gigantic physical systems having a typical size of many tens of thousands of light years. Thus any change at the center of the galaxy will affect the rim only tens of millennia later. Those retardation effects seems to be…
We argue that globular clusters (GCs) are good candidates for gravitational lenses in explaining quasar-galaxy associations. The catalog of associations (Bukhmastova 2001) compiled from the LEDA catalog of galaxies (Paturel 1997) and from…
The existence of a massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, coinciding with the radio source Sgr A*, is being established on more and more solid ground. In principle, this black hole, acting as a gravitational lens, is able to…
We study the efficiency of numerically simulated galaxy clusters for producing strong gravitational lensing events in different dark-energy cosmologies with constant and time-variable equation of state and we compare it with ``standard''…
Strong gravitational lensing can be used to directly measure the mass function of their satellites, thus testing one of the fundamental predictions of cold dark matter cosmological models. Given the importance of this test it is essential…
The amplification caused by gravitational light bending by compact objects in a foreground galaxy can affect the apparent number density of background QSOs, as well as their distribution in the fields of galactic halos. In this work we…
Cold dark matter (CDM) constitutes most of the matter in the Universe. The interplay between dark and luminous matter in dense cosmic environments like galaxy clusters is studied theoretically using cosmological simulations. Observed…