Pierre Magain

Time is a parameter playing a central role in our most fundamental modelling of natural laws. Relativity theory shows that the comparison of times measured by different clocks depends on their relative motion and on the strength of the gravitational field in which they are embedded. In standard cosmology, the time parameter is the one measured by fundamental clocks (i.e., clocks at rest with respect to the expanding space). This proper time is assumed to flow at a constant rate throughout the whole history of the universe. We make the alternative hypothesis that the rate at which the cosmological time flows depends on the dynamical state of the universe. In thermodynamics, the arrow of time is strongly related to the second law, which states that the entropy of an isolated system will always increase with time or, at best, stay constant. Hence, we assume that the time measured by fundamental clocks is proportional to the entropy of the region of the universe that is causally connected to them. Under that simple assumption, we find it possible to build toy cosmological models that present an acceleration of their expansion without any need for dark energy while being spatially closed and finite, avoiding the need to deal with infinite values.

Strong gravitational lensing gives access to the total mass distribution of galaxies. It can unveil a great deal of information about the lenses dark matter content when combined with the study of the lenses light profile. However, gravitational lensing galaxies, by definition, appear surrounded by point-like and diffuse lensed signal that is irrelevant to the lens flux. Therefore, the observer is most often restricted to studying the innermost portions of the galaxy, where classical fitting methods show some instabilities. We aim at subtracting that lensed signal and at characterising some lenses light profile by computing their shape parameters. Our objective is to evaluate the total integrated flux in an aperture the size of the Einstein ring in order to obtain a robust estimate of the quantity of ordinary matter in each system. We are expanding the work we started in a previous paper that consisted in subtracting point-like lensed images and in independently measuring each shape parameter. We improve it by designing a subtraction of the diffuse lensed signal, based only on one simple hypothesis of symmetry. This extra step improves our study of the shape parameters and we refine it even more by upgrading our half-light radius measurement. We also calculate the impact of our specific image processing on the error bars. The diffuse lensed signal subtraction makes it possible to study a larger portion of relevant galactic flux, as the radius of the fitting region increases by on average 17\%. We retrieve new half-light radii values that are on average 11\% smaller than in our previous work, although the uncertainties overlap in most cases. This shows that not taking the diffuse lensed signal into account may lead to a significant overestimate of the half-light radius. We are also able to measure the flux within the Einstein radius and to compute secure error bars to all of our results.

Luminosity profiles of galaxies acting as strong gravitational lenses can be tricky to study. Indeed, strong gravitational lensing images display several lensed components, both point-like and diffuse, around the lensing galaxy. Those objects limit the study of the galaxy luminosity to its inner parts. Therefore, the usual fitting methods perform rather badly on such images. Previous studies of strong lenses luminosity profiles using software such as GALFIT or IMFITFITS and various PSF-determining methods have resulted in discrepant results. The present work aims at investigating the causes of those discrepancies, as well as at designing more robust techniques for studying the morphology of early-type lensing galaxies with the ability to subtract a lensed signal from their luminosity profiles. We design a new method to independently measure each shape parameter, namely, the position angle, ellipticity, and half-light radius of the galaxy. Our half-light radius measurement method is based on an innovative scheme for computing isophotes that is well suited to measuring the morphological properties of gravitational lensing galaxies. Its robustness regarding various specific aspects of gravitational lensing image processing is analysed and tested against GALFIT. It is applied to a sample of systems from the CASTLES database. Simulations show that when restricted to small, inner parts of the lensing galaxy, the technique presented here is more trustworthy than GALFIT. It gives more robust results than GALFIT, which shows instabilities regarding the fitting region, the value of the Sersic index, and the signal-to-noise ratio. It is therefore better suited than GALFIT for gravitational lensing galaxies. It is also able to study lensing galaxies that are not much larger than the PSF. New values for the half-light radius of the objects in our sample are presented and compared to previous works.

Assuming that observers located inside the Universe measure a time flow which is different from the time appearing in the Friedmann-Lemaitre equation, and determining this time flow such that the Universe always appears flat to these observers, we derive a simple cosmological model which allows to explain the velocity dispersions of galaxies in galaxy clusters without introducing dark matter. It also solves the horizon problem without recourse to inflation. Moreover, it explains the present acceleration of the expansion without any resort to dark energy and provides a good fit to the observations of distant supernovae. Depending on the present value of the matter-energy density, we calculate an age of the Universe between 15.4 and 16.5 billion years, significantly larger than the 13.7 billion years of the standard Lambda-CDM model. Our model has a slower expansion rate in the early epochs, thus leaving more time for the formation of structures such as stars and galaxies.

Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) is an international journal which publishes papers on all aspects of astronomy and astrophysics

A new method is presented for determining the Point Spread Function (PSF) of images that lack bright and isolated stars. It is based on the same principles as the MCS (Magain, Courbin, Sohy, 1998) image deconvolution algorithm. It uses the information contained in all stellar images to achieve the double task of reconstructing the PSFs for single or multiple exposures of the same field and to extract the photometry of all point sources in the field of view. The use of the full information available allows to construct an accurate PSF. The possibility to simultaneously consider several exposures makes it very well suited to the measurement of the light curves of blended point sources from data that would be very difficult or even impossible to analyse with traditional PSF fitting techniques. The potential of the method for the analysis of ground-based and space-based data is tested on artificial images and illustrated by several examples, including HST/NICMOS images of a lensed quasar and VLT/ISAAC images of a faint blended Mira star in the halo of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC5128 (Cen A).

Quasars are thought to be powered by the infall of matter onto a supermassive black hole at the centre of massive galaxies. As the optical luminosity of quasars exceeds that of their host galaxy, disentangling the two components can be difficult. This led in the 1990's to the controversial claim of the discovery of 'naked' quasars. Since then, the connection between quasars and galaxies has been well established. Here we report on the observation of a quasar lying at the edge of a gas cloud, whose size is comparable to that of a small galaxy, but whose spectrum shows no evidence for stars. The gas cloud is excited by the quasar itself. If a host galaxy is present, it is at least six times fainter than would normally be expected for such a bright quasar. The quasar is interacting dynamically with a neighbouring galaxy - which matter might be feeding the black hole.

A quasar is thought to be powered by the infall of matter onto a supermassive black hole at the centre of a massive galaxy1,2. Because the optical luminosity of quasars exceeds that of their host galaxy, disentangling the two components can be difficult. This led in the 1990s to the controversial claim of the discovery of ‘naked’ quasars3,4,5,6,7. Since then, the connection between quasars and galaxies has been well established8. Here we report the discovery of a quasar lying at the edge of a gas cloud, whose size is comparable to that of a small galaxy, but whose spectrum shows no evidence for stars. The gas in the cloud is excited by the quasar itself. If a host galaxy is present, it is at least six times fainter than would normally be expected8,9 for such a bright quasar. The quasar is interacting dynamically with a neighbouring galaxy, whose gas might be feeding the black hole.

Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) is an international journal which publishes papers on all aspects of astronomy and astrophysics

We have derived abundances of O, Na, Mg, Al, Si, Ca, Sc, Ti, V, Cr, Fe, Ni and Ba for 43 metal-poor field stars in the solar neighbourhood with iron abundances [Fe/H] ranging from -0.4 to -3.0. Total abundance errors are estimated to about 0.1-0.2 dex for most elements, while relative abundances are most probably more accurate. We have made an extensive comparison with other similar studies and traced the reasons for the, in most cases, relatively small differences. Among the results we note the following: We find [O/Fe] from the O I IR- triplet lines to possibly increase beyond [Fe/H]=-1.0, though considerably less than obtained by others from abundances based on OH lines. We find correlations among the deviations for individual stars from the trends of individual alpha elements relative to Fe. This may support the idea that the formation of the Halo stars occurred in smaller systems with different star formation rates. We verify the finding by Gratton et al. (2003b) that stars that do not participate in the rotation of the galactic disk show a lower mean and larger spread in [alpha/Fe] than stars participating in the general rotation. The latter stars also seem to show some correlation between [alpha/Fe] and rotation speed. We finally advocate that a spectroscopic study of a larger sample of halo stars with well-defined selection criteria is very important, in addition to the very considerable efforts that various groups have already made. (Abridged)