Related papers: Recent Developments in Gravitational Microlensing
Microlensing of gravitationally lensed quasars by the stars in the foreground lens galaxy can be used to probe the nature of dark matter, to determine the mean stellar mass in the lens galaxy, and to measure the internal structure of quasar…
If the Dark Matter consists of primordial black holes (PBHs), we show that gravitational lensing of stars being monitored by NASA's Kepler search for extra-solar planets can cause significant numbers of detectable microlensing events. A…
A complete manual search has been carried out of the list of 285423 objects, nearly all of them galaxies, identified in the COSMOS field that are brighter than I=25. Two certain and one highly probable new gravitational lenses are found, in…
Recent rapid progress in time domain surveys makes it possible to detect various types of explosive transients in the Universe in large numbers, some of which will be gravitationally lensed into multiple images. Although a large number of…
Gravitational lensing is the relativistic effect generated by massive bodies, which bend the space-time surrounding them. It is a deeply investigated topic in astrophysics and allows validating theoretical relativistic results and studying…
With its planet detection efficiency reaching a maximum for orbital radii between 1 and 10 AU, microlensing provides a unique sensitivity to planetary systems similar to our own around galactic and even extragalactic stars acting as lenses…
Gravitational lensing is most often used as a tool to investigate the distribution of (dark) matter in the universe, but, if the mass distribution is known a priori, it becomes, at least in principle, a powerful probe of gravity itself.…
Due to their extremely small luminosity compared to the stars they orbit, planets outside our own Solar System are extraordinarily difficult to detect directly in optical light. Careful photometric monitoring of distant stars, however, can…
This paper reviews statistical methods recently developed to reconstruct and analyze dark matter mass maps from weak lensing observations. The field of weak lensing is motivated by the observations made in the last decades showing that the…
Observations of the gravitational microlensing event MOA 2003-BLG-32/OGLE 2003-BLG-219 are presented for which the peak magnification was over 500, the highest yet reported. Continuous observations around the peak enabled a sensitive search…
Dark matter may be in the form of non-baryonic structures such as compact subhalos and boson stars. Structures weighing between asteroid and solar masses may be discovered via gravitational microlensing, an astronomical probe that has in…
If planetary systems are ubiquitous then a fraction of stars should possess a transiting planet when being microlensed. This paper presents a study of the influence of such planets on microlensing light curves. For the giant planets…
The existence of a massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, coinciding with the radio source Sgr A*, is being established on more and more solid ground. In principle, this black hole, acting as a gravitational lens, is able to…
Most of the matter in the universe is not luminous and can be observed directly only through its gravitational effect. An emerging technique called weak gravitational lensing uses background galaxies to reveal the foreground dark matter…
We present a new method to identify and probe planetary companions of stars in the Galactic Bulge and Magellanic Clouds using gravitational microlensing. While spectroscopic studies of these planets is well beyond current observational…
Strong gravitational lensing at the galaxy scale is a valuable tool for various applications in astrophysics and cosmology. The primary uses of galaxy-scale lensing are to study elliptical galaxies' mass structure and evolution, constrain…
Searches for planets via gravitational lensing have focused on cases in which the projected separation, a, between planet and star is comparable to the Einstein radius, R_E. This paper considers smaller orbital separations and demonstrates…
Gravitational microlensing is a very useful tool for investigating the innermost part of lensed quasars, especially for studying a relativistic accretion disk around a massive black hole (BH) supposed to exist in a quasar's center. Here we…
The gravity due to a multiple-mass system has a remarkable gravitational effect: the extreme magnification of background light sources along extended so-called caustic lines. This property has been the channel for some remarkable…
The last decade has seen an enormous increase of activity in the field of gravitational lensing, mainly driven by improvements of observational capabilities. I will review the basics of gravitational lens theory, just enough to understand…