Related papers: Planetesimal Disk Microlensing
Resolved observations of millimetre-sized dust, tracing larger planetesimals, have pinpointed the location of 26 Edgeworth-Kuiper belt analogs. We report that a belt's distance $R$ to its host star correlates with the star's luminosity…
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…
Optical and X-ray observations of strongly gravitationally lensed quasars (especially when four separate images of the quasar are produced) determine not only the amount of matter in the lensing galaxy but also how much is in a smooth…
We study the gravitational microlensing of various static and spherically symmetric non-singular black holes (and horizonless, non-singular compact objects of similar size). For pointlike sources we extend the parametrized post-Newtonian…
A new window to observing individual stars and other small sources at cosmological distances was opened recently, with the detection of several caustic-crossing events in galaxy cluster fields. Many more such events are expected soon from…
Gravitational microlensing is a unique probe of the stellar content in strong lens galaxies. Flux ratio anomalies from gravitationally lensed supernovae (glSNe), just like lensed quasars, can be used to constrain the stellar mass fractions…
Most known extrasolar planets (exoplanets) have been discovered using the radial velocity$^{\bf 1,2}$ or transit$^{\bf 3}$ methods. Both are biased towards planets that are relatively close to their parent stars, and studies find that…
Microlensings events are predicted for the light coming from cosmological sources. In addition to the microlensing due to gravitation lensing, microlensing produced also by refraction of light due to either ionized, or not, gas clouds can…
A moving mass makes a gravitational wake in the partially ionized interstellar medium, which acts as a lens for radio-frequency light. Consequently, plasma microlensing could complement gravitational microlensing in the search for invisible…
Gravitational microlensing has become a mature technique for discovering small gravitational lenses in the Universe which are otherwise beyond our detection limits. Similarly, plasma microlensing can help us explore cosmic plasma lenses.…
We study the local behavior of gravitational lensing near fold catastrophes. Using a generic form for the lensing map near a fold, we determine the observable properties of the lensed images, focusing on the case when the individual images…
The effect of stars on the lensing properties of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center is similar to the effect of planets on microlensing by a star. We show that the dense stellar cluster around SgrA* increases by factors of a…
The current modelling of single microlensing light curves neglects the possibility that only a fraction of the light is due to the lensed star, the remaining being due to a close, unresolved blend, which may be related or unrelated to the…
In quasars which are lensed by galaxies, the point-like images sometimes show sharp and uncorrelated brightness variations (microlensing). These brightness changes are associated with the innermost region of the quasar passing through a…
The presence of dusty debris around main sequence stars denotes the existence of planetary systems. Such debris disks are often identified by the presence of excess continuum emission at infrared and (sub-)millimetre wavelengths, with…
We consider the feasibility of directly observing gravitational microlensing in extra-galactic sources, whose stars are not generally resolved. This precludes use of the simple optical depth to microlensing formulation, which is applicable…
Microlensing not only brings extra magnification lightcurves on top of the intrinsic ones but also shifts them in time domain, making the actual time-delays between images of strongly lensed active galactic nucleus change on the $\sim$…
Microlensing is now a very popular observational astronomical technique. The investigations accessible through this effect range from the dark matter problem to the search for extra-solar planets. In this review, the techniques to search…
We study light variability of gravitationally magnified high-redshift star clusters induced by a foreground population of microlenses. This arises as the incoherent superposition of light variations from a large number of source stars…
Gravitational microlensing is a powerful tool for probing the physical properties of quasar accretion disks and properties of the lens galaxy such as its dark matter fraction and mean stellar mass. Unfortunately the number of lensed quasars…