Related papers: Gravitational Microlensing: A parallel, large-data…
We present a framework that reformulates gravitational lensing as an optical phenomenon governed by an effective refractive index, enabling exploration of modified gravity theories using undergraduate-level mathematics and optics. After…
We review progress in understanding dark matter by astrophysics, and particularly via the effect of gravitational lensing. Evidence from many different directions now all imply that five sixths of the material content of the universe is in…
Foundations of standard theory of microlensing are described, namely we consider microlensing stars in Galactic bulge, the Magellanic Clouds or other nearby galaxies. We suppose that gravitational microlenses lie between an Earth observer…
According to the theory of general relativity, masses deflect light in a way similar to convex glass lenses. This gravitational lensing effect is astigmatic, giving rise to image distortions. These distortions allow to quantify cosmic…
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 review theory and applications of weak gravitational lensing. After summarising Friedmann-Lemaitre cosmological models, we present the formalism of gravitational lensing and light propagation in arbitrary space-times. We discuss how…
Since the first discovery of microlensing events nearly two decades ago, gravitational microlensing has accumulated tens of TBytes of data and developed into a powerful astrophysical technique with diverse applications. The review starts…
In this speculative, millenial essay, I try to anticipate what sort of novel gravitational optics investigations might be observed, after it becomes possible to map and monitor roughly a trillion sources (of which a billion may be usefully…
Gravitational lensing has become one of the most powerful tools available for investigating the 'dark side' of the universe. Cosmological strong gravitational lensing, in particular, probes the properties of the dense cores of dark matter…
Given an observed gravitational lens mirage produced by a foreground deflector (cf. galaxy, quasar, cluster,...), it is possible via numerical lens inversion to retrieve the real source image, taking full advantage of the magnifying power…
We develop the spacetime approach to gravitational lensing by spherically symmetric perturbations of flat, cosmological constant-dominated Friedman-Robertson-Walker metrics. The geodesics of the spacetime are expressed as integral…
Weak gravitational lensing provides a unique method to map directly the distribution of dark matter in the universe and to measure cosmological parameters. This cosmic-shear technique is based on the measurement of the weak distortions that…
A long-standing problem in astrophysics is to measure the mass associated with galaxies. Gravitational lensing provides one of the cleanest ways to make this measurement. To date, the most powerful lensing probes of galactic mass have been…
Gravitational microlensing within the Galaxy offers the prospect of probing the details of distant stellar sources, as well as revealing the distribution of compact (and potentially non-luminous) masses along the line-of-sight. Recently, it…
We found strong similarities between the gravitational lensing and the conventional optical lensing. The similarities imply a graded refractive index description of the light deflection in gravitational field. We got a general approach to…
We describe a new method for measuring galaxy magnification due to weak gravitational lensing. Our method makes use of a tight scaling relation between galaxy properties that are modified by gravitational lensing, such as apparent size, and…
This course presents some applications of gravitational lensing to the measurement of masses of galaxies (galaxy-galaxy lensing, Eintein rings, perturbations of giant arcs) and cluster of galaxies (strong and weak lensing). This complements…
There is abundant evidence that the mass of the Universe is dominated by dark matter of unknown form. The MACHO project is one of several teams searching for the dark matter around our Galaxy in the form of Massive Compact Halo Objects…
Detection of quasi-monochromatic, long-duration (continuous) gravitational wave radiation emitted by, e.g., asymmetric rotating neutron stars in our Galaxy requires a long observation time to distinguish it from the detector's noise. If…
The magnification induced by gravitational microlensing is sensitive to the size of a source relative to the Einstein radius, the natural microlensing scale length. This paper investigates the effect of source size in the case where the…