Dark matter dominates the mass distribution of the universe, and dark energy determines its expansion. The two are the most mysterious and attractive subjects in modern cosmology, because they provide an opportunity to discover new fundamental physics. Cosmological weak gravitational lensing, which describes the deflection of photons by the gravitational force from large-scale structure in the universe, has been an active area of research in the past decade with many completed, ongoing, and upcoming surveys. Because weak lensing is sensitive to the growth of structure and expansion history of the universe, it is a great tool for improving our understanding of both dark matter and dark energy problems. Cosmic structures have become non-linear by gravitational clustering. The non-linear structures are important to weak lensing, and cause non-Gaussianity in the lensing maps. In this thesis, I study the influence of non-linearity and non-Gaussianity on the uncertainty of lensing measurements. I develop a new method to robustly measure the covariance matrix of the lensing convergence power spectrum, from simulations. Because 21-cm intensity map may soon cover half sky at redshift 1-4, I build optimal estimators for reconstructing lensing from the 21-cm sources. I develop Gaussian optimal estimators which can be derived nalytically, and non-Gaussian optimal estimators which can be constructed numerically from simulation data. I then run a large number of N-body simulations. For both lenses and 21-cm sources, I explore the statistical uncertainties in the simulation data. We show that the non-Gaussianity nature of lensing decreases the dark energy figure of merit by a factor of 1.3 to 1.6 for a few future surveys. We also find that the non-Gaussianity nature of the 21-cm sources reduces the signal to noise ratio by several orders of magnitude. The reconstruction noise saturates at mildly non-linear scales, where the linear power spectrum of the source is $\Delta^2\sim 0.2-0.5$. For 21-cm sources at $z\sim 2-4$, the lensing reconstruction is limited by cosmic variance at $\ell \lesssim 100$, which is in the linear regime of gravitational growth, and robustly predicted by theory. This allows promising constraints to various modified gravity and dark energy models.

Supernovae are fundamental in astronomy: they inject high mass elements into the interstellar medium enriching the chemistry of galaxies, they feed processes of star formation and active galactic nuclei, and they have been a key for the developments in cosmology of the past decades. This dissertation presents a set of subluminous type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) at z>0.1 from the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS). These faint and short-lived transients are found in massive and passive host galaxies. We measure a volumetric rate as a function of redshift that is different from the normal SNIa population. The observations point towards a long delay time since the birth of the progenitors systems and argue for progenitor stars of initial low mass. We calculate a stretch-corrected rise-time since explosion to maximum brightness for different sets of SNe~Ia. We find that a fiducial 17 day quadratic rise is sufficient to explain all SNe Ia, including subluminous ones, arguing for their homogeneity throughout the entire light-curve. Subluminous SNe Ia are powered by as little as 0.05 solar masses of radioactive nickel synthesized in the explosion. Theoretical models need to explain these challenging weak explosions within the framework of SNe Ia. Finally, we develop one of the first robust automated techniques to identify plateau supernovae (SNe IIP) in large photometric transient surveys. This simple method was tested with a variety of real and simulated SN samples and proved to be effective across different redshifts. Such a photometric typing will be of great power for coming surveys and will allow numerous scientific studies of SNe IIP.

Dark matter dominates the mass distribution of the universe, and dark energy determines its expansion. The two are the most mysterious and attractive subjects in modern cosmology, because they provide an opportunity to discover new fundamental physics. Cosmological weak gravitational lensing, which describes the deflection of photons by the gravitational force from large-scale structure in the universe, has been an active area of research in the past decade with many completed, ongoing, and upcoming surveys. Because weak lensing is sensitive to the growth of structure and expansion history of the universe, it is a great tool for improving our understanding of both dark matter and dark energy problems. Cosmic structures have become non-linear by gravitational clustering. The non-linear structures are important to weak lensing, and cause non-Gaussianity in the lensing maps. In this thesis, I study the influence of non-linearity and non-Gaussianity on the uncertainty of lensing measurements. I develop a new method to robustly measure the covariance matrix of the lensing convergence power spectrum, from simulations. Because 21-cm intensity map may soon cover half sky at redshift 1-4, I build optimal estimators for reconstructing lensing from the 21-cm sources. I develop Gaussian optimal estimators which can be derived nalytically, and non-Gaussian optimal estimators which can be constructed numerically from simulation data. I then run a large number of N-body simulations. For both lenses and 21-cm sources, I explore the statistical uncertainties in the simulation data. We show that the non-Gaussianity nature of lensing decreases the dark energy figure of merit by a factor of 1.3 to 1.6 for a few future surveys. We also find that the non-Gaussianity nature of the 21-cm sources reduces the signal to noise ratio by several orders of magnitude. The reconstruction noise saturates at mildly non-linear scales, where the linear power spectrum of the source is $\Delta^2\sim 0.2-0.5$. For 21-cm sources at $z\sim 2-4$, the lensing reconstruction is limited by cosmic variance at $\ell \lesssim 100$, which is in the linear regime of gravitational growth, and robustly predicted by theory. This allows promising constraints to various modified gravity and dark energy models.

Supernovae are fundamental in astronomy: they inject high mass elements into the interstellar medium enriching the chemistry of galaxies, they feed processes of star formation and active galactic nuclei, and they have been a key for the developments in cosmology of the past decades. This dissertation presents a set of subluminous type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) at z>0.1 from the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS). These faint and short-lived transients are found in massive and passive host galaxies. We measure a volumetric rate as a function of redshift that is different from the normal SNIa population. The observations point towards a long delay time since the birth of the progenitors systems and argue for progenitor stars of initial low mass. We calculate a stretch-corrected rise-time since explosion to maximum brightness for different sets of SNe~Ia. We find that a fiducial 17 day quadratic rise is sufficient to explain all SNe Ia, including subluminous ones, arguing for their homogeneity throughout the entire light-curve. Subluminous SNe Ia are powered by as little as 0.05 solar masses of radioactive nickel synthesized in the explosion. Theoretical models need to explain these challenging weak explosions within the framework of SNe Ia. Finally, we develop one of the first robust automated techniques to identify plateau supernovae (SNe IIP) in large photometric transient surveys. This simple method was tested with a variety of real and simulated SN samples and proved to be effective across different redshifts. Such a photometric typing will be of great power for coming surveys and will allow numerous scientific studies of SNe IIP.

The explosion of massive stars involves the formation of a shock wave. In stars that develop iron cores, this shock wave stalls on its way out due to neutrino emission and the breakup of heavy nuclei flowing through the shock. For the explosion to succeed, a fraction of the gravitational binding energy of the collapsed core that is radiated in neutrinos needs to be absorbed by the material below the shock. How much energy is needed depends on the interplay between non-spherical hydrodynamic instabilities, neutrino heating, and nuclear dissociation. This thesis seeks to understand this interplay through numerical experiments that model the key physical components of the system and separate them out to examine their individual effects. Specifically, one- and two-dimensional time-dependent hydrodynamic simulations are performed to study the effects of non-spherical shock oscillations, neutrino-driven convection, and alpha particle recombination on the dynamics of the system and the critical heating rate for explosion. We find that nuclear dissociation has a significant effect on the linear stability and saturation amplitude of shock oscillations. At the critical neutrino heating rate for an explosion, convection due to a negative entropy gradient plays a major role in driving dipolar shock motions. One dimensional explosions are due to a global instability involving the advection of entropy perturbations from the shock to the region where the accretion flow cools due to neutrino emission. Large scale shock expansions in two-dimensions are due to a finite amplitude instability involving the balance between buoyancy forces and the ram pressure of the flow upstream of the shock. During these expansions, a significant amount of energy is released when nucleons recombine into alpha particles, constituting a significant last step in the transition to explosion. The critical neutrino heating rate for an explosion depends sensitively on the starting radius of the shock relative to the radius at which the binding energy of an alpha particle is comparable to the gravitational binding energy.

Our universe is inherently inhomogeneous yet it is common in the study of cosmology to model our universe after the homogeneous and isotropic Friedmann-Lemaıtre-Roberson-Walker (FLRW) model. In this thesis spacetime matchings are applied to investigate more general inhomogeneous cosmologies. The Cheese Slice universe, constructed from matching together FLRW and Kasner regions satisfying the Darmois matching conditions, is used as a prime example of an inhomogeneous cosmology. Some observational consequences of this model are presented. The lookback time verses redshift relation is calculated using a numerical algorithm and it is shown that the relative thickness of the Kasner regions have the greatest impact on anisotropies an observer would see. The number of layers and distribution of layers play a smaller role in this regard. The relative thickness of the Kasner slice should be on the order of one ten thousandth the thickness of the FLRW regions to have the anisotropies fall within the observed CMB limit. The approach to the singularity of a spacetime matching is examined. A criterion is presented for a matched spacetime to be considered Asymptotically Velocity Term Dominated (AVTD). Both sides of the matching must be AVTD and each leaf of the respective foliations mush match as well. It is demonstrated that the open and flat Cheese Slice universe are both AVTD and the singularity is also of AVTD type. The Cheese Slice model is then examined as a braneworld construction. The possibility of a Cheese Slice brane satisfying all the energy conditions is shown. However, the embedding of such a brane into a symmetric bulk is non-trivial. The general embedding of a matched spacetime into a bulk is investigated using a Taylor series approximation of the bulk. It is found that the energy-momentum tensor of such a brane cannot have discrete jumps if the embedding does not have a corner. A 3+1+1 decomposition of the bulk spacetime is then carried out. With the spacetime being deconstructed along two preferred timelike hypersurfaces, this becomes a natural environment to discuss the matching of branes. We find that there are conditions on the matter content of the branes to be matched if an observer on the brane is to see the matching surface as a boundary surface with no additional stress energy. Matching more than two bulks is also examined and shown to allow for more general brane configurations.

BLAST is a balloon-borne large-aperture, submillimetre telescope, which makes large area (1-200 square degree) surveys of Galactic and extragalactic targets. Since BLAST observes in the stratosphere, it is able to make broad-band observations between 200um and 550um which are difficult or impossible to perform from the ground. BLAST has been designed to probe star formation both in the local Galaxy and in the high redshift (z=1-4) universe. Because BLAST is flown on an unmanned stratospheric balloon platform, it has been designed to be able to operate autonomously, without needing operator intervention to perform its scientific goals. This thesis includes an overview of the design of the BLAST platform, with emphasis on the command and control systems used to operate the telescope. BLAST has been flown on two long-duration balloon flights. The first of these, from Esrange, Sweden in June of 2005, acquired ~70 hours of primarily Galactic data. During the second flight, from Willy Field, Antarctica in December of 2006, BLAST acquired ~225 hours of both Galactic and extragalactic data. Operational performance of the platform during these two flights is reviewed, with the goal of providing insight on how future flights can be improved. Reduction of the data acquired by these large-format bolometer arrays is a challenging procedure, and techniques developed for BLAST data reduction are reviewed. The ultimate goal of this reduction is the generation of high quality astronomical maps which can be used for subsequent portions of data analysis. This thesis treats, in detail, the iterative, maximum likelihood map maker developed for BLAST. Results of simulations performed on the map maker to characterise its ability to reconstruct astronomical signals are presented. Finally, astronomical maps produced by this map maker using real data acquired by BLAST are presented, with a discussion on non-physical map pathologies resulting from the data reduction pipeline and map making procedures.

In this thesis, we focus on obtaining and interpreting observational information on (i) the role of multiplicity on the properties of young stars; (ii) the early evolutionary influence of circumstellar disks; and (iii) the nature of accretion in young systems. To facilitate this research, we conducted an extensive multi-epoch high-resolution spectroscopic survey at optical wavelengths (3,200-10,000 A) of ~200 T Tauri stars in the ~2 Myr old Chamaeleon I, and Taurus-Auriga star-forming regions with the Magellan Inamori Kyocera Echelle (MIKE) spectrograph on the Magellan Clay 6.5 m telescope. From the spectroscopic data, we identify eight close binaries and four close triples, of which three and two, respectively, are new discoveries. We find that the multiplicity fraction for Cha I and Tau-Aur are similar to each other, and to the results of field star surveys. The frequency of systems with close companions in our sample is not seen to depend on primary mass or accretion. We probed for evidence of disk braking. We did not see a statistically significant difference between the distribution of rotational velocities with the presence of an inner disk. Also, our findings show that F-K stars in our sample have larger rotational velocities and specific angular momentum than M stars. We also analyzed accretion variability in our sample using the H\alpha 10% width and the CaII-8662 line flux as accretion diagnostics. We find that the maximum extent of accretion variability in our sample was reached on timescale of a few days, indicating that rotation could significantly contribute to the variability.

We demonstrate the application of CMB techniques to measure the clustering of infrared emitting star-forming galaxies. We detect correlations in the cosmic far-infrared background due to the clustering of star-forming galaxies in observations made with the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope, BLAST, at 250, 350, and 500μm. We perform jackknife and other tests to confirm the reality of the signal. The measured correlations are well fit by a power law over scales of 5–25 arcminutes, with ∆I/I = 15.1 ± 1.7%. We adopt a specific model for submillimeter sources in which the contribution to clustering comes from sources in the redshift ranges 1.3≤z≤2.2, 1.5≤z≤2.7,and1.7≤z≤3.2,at 250, 350 and 500 μm, respectively. With these distributions, our measurement of the power spectrum, P(kθ), corresponds to linear bias parameters, b = 3.8±0.6,3.9±0.6 and 4.4±0.7, respectively. We further interpret the results in terms of the halo model, and find that at the smaller scales, the simplest halo model fails to fit our results. One way to improve the fit is to increase the radius at which dark matter halos are artificially truncated in the model, which is equivalent to having some star-forming galaxies at z ≥ 1 located in the outskirts of groups and clusters. In the context of this model we find a minimum halo mass required to host a galaxy is log(Mmin/M⊙) = 11.5+0.4, and we derive effective biases beff = 2.2 ± 0.2, 2.4 ± 0.2, −0.1 and 2.6 ± 0.2, and effective masses log(Meff/M⊙) = 12.9 ± 0.3, 12.8 ± 0.2, and 12.7 ± 0.2 , at 250, 350 and 500 μm, corresponding to spatial correlation lengths of r0 = 4.9, 5.0, and 5.2 ±0.7 h−1 Mpc, respectively. Finally, we discuss implications for clustering measurement strategies with Herschel and Planck.

BLAST is a balloon-borne large-aperture, submillimetre telescope, which makes large area (1-200 square degree) surveys of Galactic and extragalactic targets. Since BLAST observes in the stratosphere, it is able to make broad-band observations between 200um and 550um which are difficult or impossible to perform from the ground. BLAST has been designed to probe star formation both in the local Galaxy and in the high redshift (z=1-4) universe. Because BLAST is flown on an unmanned stratospheric balloon platform, it has been designed to be able to operate autonomously, without needing operator intervention to perform its scientific goals. This thesis includes an overview of the design of the BLAST platform, with emphasis on the command and control systems used to operate the telescope. BLAST has been flown on two long-duration balloon flights. The first of these, from Esrange, Sweden in June of 2005, acquired ~70 hours of primarily Galactic data. During the second flight, from Willy Field, Antarctica in December of 2006, BLAST acquired ~225 hours of both Galactic and extragalactic data. Operational performance of the platform during these two flights is reviewed, with the goal of providing insight on how future flights can be improved. Reduction of the data acquired by these large-format bolometer arrays is a challenging procedure, and techniques developed for BLAST data reduction are reviewed. The ultimate goal of this reduction is the generation of high quality astronomical maps which can be used for subsequent portions of data analysis. This thesis treats, in detail, the iterative, maximum likelihood map maker developed for BLAST. Results of simulations performed on the map maker to characterise its ability to reconstruct astronomical signals are presented. Finally, astronomical maps produced by this map maker using real data acquired by BLAST are presented, with a discussion on non-physical map pathologies resulting from the data reduction pipeline and map making procedures.