We have made radioand millimeter-wavelength interferometric observations of a variety of molecular absorption lines toward the gravitational lens systems B0218+357 and PKS 1830−211. The absorption occurs in the lensing galaxies at redshifts of 0.685 and 0.89, respectively. The high spatial resolution of our VLA and VLBA observations allows imaging of the background continuum emission and the ab...

Context. Observations of the cosmic microwave background, light element abundances, large-scale distribution of galaxies, and distant supernovae are the primary tools for determining the cosmological parameters that define the global structure of the Universe. Aims. Here we illustrate how the combination of observations related to strong gravitational lensing and stellar dynamics in elliptical ...

Ice lens formation, which follows rain on snow events or melt-refreeze cycles in winter and spring, is likely to become more frequent as a result of increasing mean winter temperatures at high latitudes. These ice lenses significantly affect the microwave scattering and emission properties and, hence, snow brightness temperatures that are widely used to monitor snow cover properties from space....

The weak lensing magnification of distant light by clusters of galaxies, assumed to be virialized systems with an NFW density profile, was calculated analytically as a statistical average over a random non-evolving distribution within z = 1. The effect is exactly cancelled by the Dyer-Roeder beam in between clusters this conclusion is valid also for an ensemble of spherical clumps of arbitrary ...

Weak gravitational lensing has several important effects on the cosmic microwave background (CMB): it changes the CMB power spectra, induces non-Gaussianities, and generates a B-mode polarization signal that is an important source of confusion for the signal from primordial gravitational waves. The lensing signal can also be used to help constrain cosmological parameters and lensing mass distri...

Extensive analyses of statistical strong gravitational lensing are performed based on the final Cosmic Lens All-Sky Survey (CLASS) well-defined statistical sample of flat-spectrum radio sources and current estimates of galaxy luminosity functions per morphological type. The analyses are done under the assumption that galactic lenses are well-approximated by singular isothermal ellipsoids and ea...

An extremely sensitive all-sky survey will be carried out in the millimetre/submillimetre waveband by the forthcoming ESA mission Planck Surveyor. The main scienti c goal of the mission is to make very accurate measurements of the spatial power spectrum of primordial anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation; however, hundreds of thousands of distant dusty galaxies and quasars w...