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Keren Sharon

U-M President’s Postdoctoral Fellow

University of Michigan Department of Astronomy
909 Dennison Building
500 Church Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1042

Office Location(s): 909 Dennsion
Phone: 734.936.7904
Fax: 734.763.6317
kerens@umich.edu
Research Website

  • About

    PhD, Tel Aviv University/Israel | U-M President’s Postdoctoral Fellow | Key Collaborator: Eric Bell

    Strong gravitational lensing, galaxy clusters

    Keren Sharon’s main research interest is using the phenomenon of strong gravitational lensing as a tool to understand massive structures in the Universe and, through their exceptional magnification, study distant galaxies. The focus of her fellowship is to analyze a large sample of strong-lensing clusters, which she and collaborators have compiled, to study the properties of the cores of galaxy clusters. The project will extend her efforts to construct mass models for these clusters in order to provide information about their dark matter halos. Combined with other observables, such as the light distribution, velocity dispersions, and X-ray and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich measurements, these models will help address several questions: Are lensing clusters over-concentrated? Does light follow mass? Is the dark matter distribution in lensing-selected clusters inherently different than in X-ray-selected clusters? After modeling the clusters as gravitational lenses, she will use them as natural telescopes to study background galaxies in detail.

    Related Research Interests

    High-redshift galaxies, supernova rates, galaxy evolution

    Publications

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