Related papers: Constraining the Dark Matter Distribution With Lar…
The aim of this review article is to give a comprehensive description of the scaling properties detected for the distribution of cosmic structures. Due to the great variety of statistical methods to describe the large-scale structure of the…
The long-awaited promise of studying high-redshift galaxies at long wavelengths has been partially eclipsed by progress at optical wavelengths, mostly because of the number of available pixels. It is nonetheless essential to study optically…
The Lenses Structure and Dynamics (LSD) Survey aims at measuring the luminous and dark matter distribution of high redshift early-type galaxies by combining gravitational lens analysis with newly determined velocity dispersion profiles.…
The distribution of the stellar and gaseous components in low surface brightness galaxies has been determined directly from optical and HI imaging. The distribution of what might be the dominant mass component, the dark matter, which is…
I give a review of the development of the concept of dark matter. The dark matter story passed through several stages from a minor observational puzzle to a major challenge for theory of elementary particles. Modern data suggest that dark…
It is generally thought that galaxies are embedded in dark matter halos extending well beyond their luminous matter. The existence of these galactic halos is mainly derived from the larger than expected velocities of stars and gas in the…
Recent key observational results on the variation of fine structure constant, the proton to electron mass ratio and the gravitational constant are reviewed. The necessity to substantiate the dark sector of cosmology and to test gravity on…
Since the first detection of intracluster planetary nebulae in 1996, imaging and spectroscopic surveys identified such stars to trace the radial extent and the kinematics of diffuse light in clusters. This topic of research is tightly…
The observed excess of gravitational forces in galaxies and galactic clusters is usually referred as the existence of "dark matter particles" of unknown origin. An alternative explanation of the dark matter effect is presented here by…
The centres of galaxies are powerful laboratories to test the current $\Lambda$CDM model for structure formation and evolution. While these sub-galactic scales can be directly investigated in the local Universe, it is observationally…
Weak lensing provides a direct measure of the distribution of mass in the universe, and is therefore a uniquely powerful probe of dark matter. Weak lensing can also be used to measure the twin phenomenon of dark energy, via its effect upon…
In the past years a wealth of observations has allowed us to unravel the structural properties of the Dark and Luminous mass distribution in spirals. As result, it has been found that their rotation curves follow, out their virial radius,…
In this review, the formation, evolution, and decay of the large-scale structure of the Universe is discussed in the context of observational data, numerical simulations, and the Cosmological Standard Model (CSM). Problems concerning…
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…
In the last years, we saw more and more attempts to explain dark matter as a general relativistic effect, at least for some fraction. Following this philosophy, we considered the gravitational distortions due to the inhomogeneous…
Perturbations to stellar systems can reflect the gravitational influence of dark matter substructures. On scales much smaller than the size of a stellar system, we point out analytic connections between the stellar and dark matter…
Galaxies lose mass as a result of their luminosity or gaseous outflows. I calculate the resulting radial migration of stars outwards and show that it could potentially be measured with high resolution spectrographs on the next generation of…
This thesis focuses on characterizing the distribution of points and galaxies using multifractal analysis. In this attempt the main emphasis is on calculating the Minkowski-Bouligand fractal dimension (Dq) of the distribution of points over…
We review progress in understanding dark matter by astrophysics, and particularly via the effect of gravitational lensing. Evidence from many different directions now all imply that five sixths of the material content of the universe is in…
In the past years a wealth of observations has unraveled the structural properties of the Dark and Luminous mass distribution in spirals. These have pointed out to an intriguing scenario not easily explained by present theories of galaxy…