Related papers: Detecting circumstellar disks around gravitational…
The gravitational fields of astrophysical bodies bend the light around them, creating multiple paths along which light from a distant source can arrive at Earth. Measuring the difference in photon arrival time along these different paths…
We present an analysis of the large set of microlensing events detected so far toward the Galactic center with the purpose of investigating whether some of the dark lenses are located in Galactic globular clusters. We find that in four…
Strongly lensed gravitational waves may pass through the stellar field of a lensing galaxy with additional modulations (on both phase and amplitude) due to gravitational microlensing effect of stars/remnants near the line of sight. These…
The high-magnification gravitational lensing cross-section of a galaxy is enhanced significantly if a baryonic disc is embedded in its dark matter halo. We investigate the effects of a population of such disks on the probability of…
We analyze the first-year MACHO collaboration observations of microlensing towards the Galactic center using a new direct likelihood technique that is sensitive to the distribution of the events on the sky. We consider the full set of 41…
The status of searches for gravitational microlensing events of the stars in our galaxy and in other galaxies of the Local Group, the interpretation of the results, some theory, and prospects for the future are reviewed. The searches have…
The gravitational microlensing technique allows the discovery of exoplanets around stars distributed in the disk of the galaxy towards the bulge. However, the alignment of two stars that led to the discovery is unique over the timescale of…
Gravitational microlensing events of high magnification have been shown to be promising targets for detecting extrasolar planets. However, only a few events of high magnification have been found using conventional survey techniques. Here we…
The optical depth to microlensing toward M31 due to known stars in the disk of M31 itself is $\tau\sim 2\times 10^{-7}e^{-r/d}$ where $d$ is the disk scale length and $r$ is the distance along the major axis. Thus, there can be significant…
We describe the feasibility of detecting the gravitational deflection of light emitted by stars moving under the influence of the massive object at the Galactic center. Light emitted by a star orbiting behind the central mass has a smaller…
We propose a direct method to detect close-in giant planets orbiting stars in the Galactic bulge. This method uses caustic-crossing binary microlensing events discovered by survey teams monitoring the bulge to measure light from a planet…
Gravitational microlensing of planetary-mass objects (or "nanolensing", as it has been termed) can be used to probe the distribution of mass in a galaxy that is acting as a gravitational lens. Microlensing and nanolensing light curve…
We describe a new method to search for gravitational microlensing toward the Galactic bulge that employs a small camera rather than a conventional telescope and probes new regions of parameter space. The small aperture (~65 mm) permits…
One possibility for detecting low-amplitude pulsational variations is through gravitational microlensing. During a microlensing event, the temporary brightness increase leads to improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio, and thereby better…
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…
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…
Microlensing of stars in strongly lensed galaxies can lead to temporary extreme magnification factors ($\mu\!>\!1000$), enabling their detection at high redshifts. Following the discovery of Icarus, several stars at cosmological distances…
Microlensing is generally studied in the geometric optics limit. However, diffraction may be important when nearby substellar objects lens occult distant stars. In particular the effects of diffraction become more important as the…
Gravitational microlensing is a powerful tool to search for a population of invisible black holes (BHs) in the Milky Way (MW), including isolated BHs and binary BHs at wide orbits that are complementary to gravitational wave observations.…
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…