Related papers: Lensing by Groups of Galaxies
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…
In a number of multiply imaged quasar systems, a significant contribution to the lensing potential is provided by groups and clusters of galaxies associated with the primary lens. As part of an ongoing effort to gather observational data on…
Luminous tracers have been used extensively to map the large-scale matter distribution in the Universe. Similarly the dynamics of stars or galaxies can be used to estimate masses of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. However, assumptions…
The aim of this paper is to investigate the claim that stars in the lensing galaxy of a gravitationally lensed quasar system can always account for the observed microlensing of the individual quasar images. A small sample of gravitationally…
Gravitational lensing in clusters of galaxies is an efficient tool to probe the mass distribution of galaxies and clusters, high redshift objects thanks to the gravitational amplification, and the geometry of the universe. We review some…
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 study gravitational lensing by clusters of galaxies in the context of the generic class of unconventional gravity theories of the scalar--tensor type. For positive energy scalar fields with any dynamics, the bending of light by a weakly…
Galaxy-galaxy lensing (GGL) measures the 2-point cross-correlation between galaxies and mass in the Universe. In this work we seek to generalise this effect by considering the third-order correlations between galaxies and mass:…
We have measured a velocity dispersion for the foreground galaxy in this gravitationally lensed system. Our dispersion confirms the prediction from lens models, provided that the source is distant enough ($z_{_S}>0.2$). Current…
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…
Many strong gravitational lenses lie in complex environments, such as poor groups of galaxies, that significantly bias conclusions from lens analyses. We are undertaking a photometric survey of all known galaxy-mass strong lenses to…
We propose a new approach for measuring the mass profile and shape of groups and clusters of galaxies, which uses lensing magnification of distant background galaxies. The main advantage of lensing magnification is that, unlike lensing…
Microlensing promises to be a powerful tool for studying distant galaxies and quasars. As the data and models improve, there are systematic effects that need to be explored. Quasar continuum and broad-line regions may respond differently to…
Traditional evidence for large amount of dark matter is based on dynamical consideration for systems with $ t_{dyn} \gg t_{obs} $. Recent observational and theoretical developments in gravitational lensing offer a much more robust…
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…
Galaxy clusters as gravitational lenses play a unique role in astrophysics and cosmology: they permit mapping the dark matter distribution on a range of scales; they reveal the properties of high and intermediate redshift background…
We study the effects of large-scale density fluctuations on strong gravitational lensing. Previous studies have focused mostly on weak lensing, since large-scale structure alone cannot produce multiple images. When a galaxy or cluster acts…
Like light, gravitational waves can be gravitationally lensed by massive astrophysical objects. Strong gravitational lensing by galaxies and galaxy clusters is anticipated to become observable in the coming years. This phenomenon will…
We investigate how strong gravitational lensing in the concordance LCDM cosmology is affected by the stellar mass in galaxies. We extend our previous studies, based on ray-tracing through the Millennium Simulation, by including the stellar…
It is now routine to measure the weak gravitational lensing shear signal from the mean ellipticity of distant galaxies. However, conversion between ellipticity and shear assumes local linearity of the lensing potential (ie that the spatial…