Related papers: Diffractive Microlensing III: Astrometric Signatur…
In this article we review the astrophysical application of gravitational microlensing. After introducing the history of gravitational lensing, we present the key equations and concept of microlensing. The most frequent microlensing events…
The four observables associated with gravitational lensing of distant quasars by intervening galaxies: image splittings, relative amplifications, time delays, and optical depths, provide separate measures of the strength of the…
We investigate gravitational microlensing signals produced by a spatially extended object transiting in front of a finite-sized source star. The most interesting features arise for lens and source sizes comparable to the Einstein radius of…
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…
Gravitational lensing has seen a surge of interest in the past few years. The handful of strong lensing systems known in the year 2000 has now been replaced with hundreds, thanks to innovative multi-wavelength selection, and there is an…
The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), with its launch date planned for 2005, has as its goal astrometry with ~ 1 micro-arcsecond accuracy for stars as faint as 20th mag. If the SIM lives to expectations it can be used to measure…
Gravitational lensing has empowered telescopes to discover astronomical objects that are otherwise out of reach without being highly magnified by foreground structures. While we expect gravitational waves (GWs) from compact binary…
It has been shown by Paczy\'nski that gravitational microlensing is potentially a useful method for detecting the dark constituents of the halo of our galaxy, if their mass lies in the approximate domain $10^{-6} < M/M_{\odot} < 10^{-1}$.…
Gravitational waves emitted by chirping supermassive black hole binaries could in principle be used to obtain very accurate distance determinations. Provided they have an electromagnetic counterpart from which the redshift can be…
A method of detecting of short scalar gravitational waves with a wavelength of ~ 0.5 micrometers is proposed, in contrast to LIGO Project, aimed at detecting of long quadrupole gravitational waves with a wavelength in interval from 43 till…
We study gravitational lensing and the bending of light in low energy scale (M_S) gravity theories with extra space-time dimensions n. We find that due to the presence of spin-2 Kaluza-Klein states from compactification, a correction to the…
Gravitational lensing is a powerful concept in the Astrophysics to study black holes. The gravitational field of a massive object like a galaxy or black hole bends and magnifies the light from a distant object behind it. The Schwarzchild…
It is estimated that a star brighter than visual magnitude 17 is undergoing a detectable gravitational microlensing event, somewhere on the sky, at any given time. It is assumed that both lenses and sources are normal stars drawn from a…
The time delays of gravitationally lensed quasars are generally believed to be unique numbers whose measurement is limited only by the quality of the light curves and the models for the contaminating contribution of gravitational…
We discuss weak lensing characteristics in the gravitational field of a compact object in the low-energy approximation of fourth order f(R) gravity theory. The particular solution is characterized by a gravitational strength parameter…
In a gravitational lensing system, the relative transverse velocities of the lens, source, and observer induce a frequency shift in the observed radiation. While this shift is typically negligible in most astrophysical contexts, strategies…
While the deflection of light is achromatic in General Relativity, it is not always so in several new-physics models (e.g. certain quantum-gravity and string-inspired models, models with nonminimal photon-gravity coupling or with massive…
Gravitational microlensing in the wave-optics (WO) regime occurs when the Schwarzschild radius of a lensing object is comparable to or smaller than the wavelength of incoming gravitational waves (GWs), producing chromatic amplitude and…
We revisit the gravitational lensing of light or gravitational waves by Schwarzschild black hole in geometric optics. Instead of a single massless particle, we investigate the collective behavior of a congruence of light/gravitational rays,…
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…