Sharif Digital Repository

We apply the weak field approximation limit of the covariant scalar-tensor-vector gravity theory, so-called MOdified gravity (MOG), to the dynamics of clusters of galaxies by using only baryonic matter. The MOG effective gravitational potential in the weak field approximation is composed of an attractive Newtonian term and a repulsive Yukawa term with two parameters α and μ. The numerical values of these parameters have been obtained by fitting the predicted rotation curves of galaxies to observational data, yielding the best-fitting result: α =8.89±0.34 and μ = 0.042 ± 0.004 kpc-1. We extend the observational test of this theory to clusters of galaxies, using data for the ionized gas and... 

As an alternative to dark matter models, Modified Gravity (MOG) theory is a covariant modification of Einstein gravity. The theory introduces two additional scalar fields and one vector field. The aim is to explain the dynamics of astronomical systems based only on their baryonic matter. The effect of the vector field in the theory resembles a Lorentz force where each particle has a charge proportional to its inertial mass. The weak field approximation of MOG is derived by perturbing the metric and the fields around Minkowski space-time. We obtain an effective gravitational potential which yields the Newtonian attractive force plus a repulsive Yukawa force. This potential, in addition to the... 

We study the wave optics features of gravitational microlensing by a binary lens composed of a planet and a parent star. In this system, the source star near the caustic line produces a pair of images in which they can play the role of secondary sources for the observer. This optical system is similar to the Young double-slit experiment. The coherent wavefronts from a source on the lens plane can form a diffraction pattern on the observer plane. This diffraction pattern has two modes from the close- and wide-pair images. From the observational point of view, we study the possibility of detecting this effect through the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project in the resonance and... 

In this paper, we propose a new strategy for the pixel-lensing observations of M87 in the Virgo cluster using theHubble Space Telescope(HST). In contrast to a previous observational strategy by Baltz et al., we show that a few days of intensive observations with the duration of ~90 min in eachHSTorbit will increase the observational efficiency of high-magnification events by more than one order of magnitude. We perform a Monte Carlo simulation for this strategy and we show that the number of high-magnification microlensing events will increase at the rate of 4.2 events per day with a typical transit time-scale of 16 h. We also examine the possibility of observing mini-halo dark matter... 

Gravitational microlensing can be used as a unique astrophysical tool to study the atmospheres of stars thousands of parsec away from us. This capability results from the bending of light rays in the gravitational field of a lens that can magnify the light of a background source star during the lensing. Moreover, one of the consequences of this light bending is that the circular symmetry of the source is broken because distorted images are produced at either side of the lens position. This property makes it possible to observe polarization, and also the light centroid shift of images. Assigning vectors for these two parameters, they are perpendicular to each other in simple and binary... 

We study the benefits of polarimetry observations of microlensing events to detect and characterize circumstellar discs around the microlensed stars located at the Galactic bulge. These discs which are unresolvable from their host stars make a net polarization effect due to their projected elliptical shapes. Gravitational microlensing can magnify these signals and make them be resolved. The main aim of this work is to determine what extra information about these discs can be extracted from polarimetry observations of microlensing events in addition to those given by photometry ones. Hot discs which are closer to their host stars are more likely to be detected by microlensing, owing to more... 

In this work, we study the large scale structure formation in the modified gravity in the framework of Palatini formalism and compare the results with the equivalent smooth dark energy models as a tool to distinguish between these models. Through the inverse method, we reconstruct the dynamics of universe, modified gravity action and the structure formation indicators like the screened mass function and gravitational slip parameter. Consequently, we extract the matter density power spectrum for these two models in the linear regime and show that the modified gravity and dark energy models predictions are slightly different from each other at large scales. It is also shown that the growth... 

In recent years a large number of hot Jupiters orbiting in a very close orbit around the parent stars have been explored with the transit and Doppler effect methods. Here in this paper we study the gravitational microlensing effect of a binary lens on a parent star with a hot Jupiter revolving around it. Caustic crossing of the planet makes enhancements on the light curve of the parent star in which the signature of the planet can be detected by high-precision photometric observations. We use the inverse ray shooting method with tree code algorithm to generate the combined light curve of the parent star and the planet. In order to investigate the probability of observing the planet signal,... 

We introduce in f(R) gravity-Palatini formalism the method of the inverse problem to extract the action from the expansion history of the Universe. First, we use an ansatz for the scale factor and apply the inverse method to derive an appropriate action for the gravity. In the second step we use the supernova type Ia data set from the Union sample and obtain a smoothed function for the Hubble parameter up to the redshift 1.7. We apply the smoothed Hubble parameter in the inverse approach and reconstruct the corresponding action in f(R) gravity. In the next step we investigate the viability of reconstruction method, doing a Monte Carlo simulation we generate synthetic SNIa data with the... 

Modeling the structure formation in the universe, we extend the spherical-collapse model in the context of modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) starting with the linear Newtonian structure formation followed by the MONDian evolution. In MOND, the formation of structures speeds up without a need for dark matter. Starting with the top-hat overdense distribution of the matter, the structures virialize with a power-law profile of the distribution of matter. We show that the virialization process takes place gradually from the center of the structure to the outer layers. In this scenario, the smaller structures enter the MONDian regime earlier and evolve faster, hence they are older than larger... 

Shell galaxies are understood to form through the collision of a dwarf galaxy with an elliptical galaxy. Shell structures and kinematics have been noted to be independent tools to measure the gravitational potential of the shell galaxies. We compare theoretically the formation of shells in Type I shell galaxies in different gravity theories in this work because this is so far missing in the literature. We include Newtonian plus dark halo gravity, and two non-Newtonian gravity models, MOG and MOND, in identical initial systems. We investigate the effect of dynamical friction, which by slowing down the dwarf galaxy in the dark halo models limits the range of shell radii to low values. Under... 

Recent observations of gravitational waves motivate investigations for the existence of primordial black holes (PBHs). We propose the observation of gravitational microlensing of distant quasars for the range of infrared to the submillimeter wavelengths by sublunar PBHs as lenses. The advantage of observations in the longer wavelengths, comparable to the Schwarzschild radius of the lens (i.e., Rsch≃λ) is the detection of the wave optics features of the gravitational microlensing. The observation of diffraction pattern in the microlensing light curve of a quasar can break the degeneracy between the lens parameters and determine directly the lens mass as well as the distance of the lens from... 

In this work we study the spherical symmetric solutions of f(R) gravity in the metric formalism. We show that for a generic f(R) gravity, the spherical symmetric solution is consistent with the modified gravity equations except in the case of imposing an extra condition for the metric. © 2009 World Scientific Publishing Company  

We study one of the simplest covariant modified-gravity models based on the Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati (DGP) brane cosmology, a self-accelerating universe. In this model gravitational leakage into extra dimensions is responsible of late-time acceleration. We mainly focus on the effects of the model parameters on the geometry and the age of universe. Also we investigate the evolution of matter density perturbations in the modified gravity model, and obtain an analytical expression for the growth index, f. We show that increasing Ωrcleads to less growth of the density contrast δ, and also decreases the growth index. We give a fitting formula for the growth index at the present time and indicate... 

We investigate the possibility of exoplanet detection orbiting source stars in microlensing events through WFIRST observations. We perform a Monte Carlo simulation on the detection rate of exoplanets via microlensing, assuming that each source star has at least one exoplanet. The exoplanet can reflect part of the light from the parent star or emit internal thermal radiation. In this new detection channel, we use microlensing as an amplifier to magnify the reflection light from the planet. In the literature, this mode of detecting exoplanets has been investigated much less than the usual mode in which the exoplanets are considered as one companion in binary-lens events. Assuming 72 d of... 

The finite-size effect in gravitational microlensing provides a possibility to measure the limb darkening of distant stars. We use the Finite Element Method (FEM) as an inversion tool for discretization and inversion of the magnification-limb darkening integral equation. This method makes no explicit assumption about the shape of the brightness profile more than the flatness of the profile near the centre of the stellar disc. From the simulation, we investigate the accuracy and stability of this method and we use regularization techniques to stabilize it. Finally, we apply this method to the single lens, high-magnification transit events of OGLE-2004-BLG-254 (SAAO-I),... 

Fuzzy dark matter (FDM) is one of the recent models for dark matter. According to this model, dark matter is made of very light scalar particles with considerable quantum mechanical effects on the galactic scale, which solves many problems of cold dark matter (CDM). Here we use the observed data from the rotation curve of the Milky Way (MW) Galaxy to compare the results from FDM and CDM models. We show that FDM adds a local peak on the rotation curve close to the center of the bulge, where its position and amplitude depend on the mass of FDM particles. By fitting the observed rotation curve with our expectation from FDM, we find that the mass of FDM is m=2.5-2.0+3.6×10-21 eV. We note that... 

One of the challenging questions in cosmology is the nature of dark matter particles. Fuzzy dark matter (FDM) is one of the candidates which is made of very light (mFDM≃10-22-10-21 eV) bosonic particles with no self-interaction. It is introduced by the motivation to solve the core-cusp problem in the galactic halos. In this work, we investigate the observational features from FDM halo collisions. Taking into account the quantum wavelength of the condensed bosonic structure, we determine the interference of the wave function of cores after collision. The fringe formation in the wave function is associated to the density contrast of the dark matter inside the colliding galaxies. The... 

We use metric formalism in f(R) modified gravity to study the dynamics of various systems from the solar system to the cosmological scale. We assume an ansatz for the derivative of action as a function of distance and describe the Pioneer anomaly and the flat rotation curve of the spiral galaxies. Having the asymptotic behavior of action, we propose the action of f(R)=(R+Λ)(1+ln (R/Rc)/(R/R0+2/α)) where in galactic and solar system scales it can recover our desired form. The vacuum solution of this action also results in a positive late time acceleration for the Universe. We fix the parameters of this model, comparing with the Pioneer anomaly, rotation curve of spiral galaxies, and supernova... 

In this work we study the dynamics of the Universe in f(R)=R2-R02 modified gravity with the Palatini formalism. We use data from recent observations, such as the supernova type Ia Gold sample and Supernova Legacy Survey data, the size of the baryonic acoustic peak from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the position of the acoustic peak from the cosmic microwave background observations, and large-scale structure formation from the 2dFGRS survey, to put constraints on the parameters of the model. To check the consistency of this action, we compare the age of old cosmological objects with the age of the Universe. In the combined analysis with all the observations, we find the parameters of the...