Previous research has shown that good looks, particularly being deemed attractive or competent-looking, can provide an electoral advantage. There is also evidence to support the notion that more dominant looks are associated with military success. To date, there has been little research into the effect of looks on political leadership success in a non-democratic setting. This project explores t...

We investigate how the survival of dark matter satellites inside virialized halos depends on tidal stripping and dynamical friction. We use an analytic approach and then compare the results with N-Body simulations. Both the satellites and the primary halos are similar to cosmological haloes and have NFW density profiles. Satellites can either merge with the primary halo or continue to move on b...

Image flux ratio anomalies have been attributed to substructures within the gravitational lens and to small mass halos (M < ∼ 10 10 M⊙) in intergalactic space. In this paper, analytic calculations are presented that help in the understanding of how intergalactic halos affect magnification ratios. It is found that intergalactic halos can produce anomalies at a similar level to those that are obs...

The high signal to noise and good point spread function of XMM have allowed the first detailed study of the interaction between the thermal and radio emitting plasma in the central regions of M87. We show that the X-ray emitting structure, previously seen by ROSAT, is thermal in nature and that the east and southwest extensions in M87’s X-ray halo have a significantly lower temperature (kT = 1....

Recent studies suggest that the orientations of large, bright galaxies within their dark matter halos are related to the morphologies of the galaxies themselves. Elliptical galaxies tend to be oriented such that, in projection on the sky, the mass (i.e., the dark matter) is well-aligned with the luminous galaxy. On the other hand, disk galaxies tend to be oriented such that their angular moment...

This paper primarily addresses the question of whether recent lensing observations probing the small scale structure in the universe are consistent with the ΛCDM model. Here a conservative approach is taken where only the most difficult to explain cases of image flux anomalies in strong lenses are considered. Numerical simulations are performed to compare predictions for the ΛCDM small scale ma...

Diverse non-equilibrium eutectic structures have attracted numerous experimental and theoretical studies. One special type is the formation of a halo of one phase around a primary dendrite of another phase. In our experiments, it was occasionally observed that ScNi halos grow as dendritic morphology around the primary Sc 2 Ni dendrites in an arc-melted ScNi-Sc 2 Ni off-eutectic binary alloy. Th...

Aims. Giant radio halos are mega-parsec scale synchrotron sources detected in a significant fraction of massive and merging galaxy clusters. Radio halos provide one of the most important pieces of evidence of non-thermal components in large-scale structure. Their statistical properties can be used to discriminate among various models for their origin. Therefore, theoretical predictions of the o...