Related papers: New observable for gravitational lensing effects d…
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 phenomenon of microlensing has successfully been used to detect extrasolar planets. By observing characteristic, rare deviations in the gravitational microlensing light curve one can discover that a lens is a star--planet system. In…
We consider small-scale spheroidal clusters of weakly interacting massive particles in our Galaxy as non-compact gravitational microlenses and predict the appearance of caustics in the plane of a lensed source. The crossing of these…
An intervening galaxy acts as a gravitational lens and produces multiple images of a single source such as a remote galaxy. Galaxies have peculiar speeds in addition to the bulk motion arising due to the expansion of the universe. There is…
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…
Gravitational lensing has established itself as a valuable tool in many astrophysical fields in the roughly 20 years of its existence as an observational science. In this brief review, first the basics of lensing are introduced. Then it is…
The gravitational microlensing light curves that reveal the presence of extrasolar planets generally yield the planet-star mass ratio and separation in units of the Einstein ring radius. The microlensing method does not require the…
We revisit the gravitational lensing phenomenon using a new visualization technique. It consists in projecting the observers sky into the source plane, what gives rise to a folded and stretched surface. This provides a clear graphical tool…
Gravitational lensing events provide unique opportunities to discover and study planetary systems and binaries. Here we build on previous work to explore the role that orbital motion can play in both identifying and learning more about…
We study in detail gravitational lensing caused by a supermassive fermion star and compare it with lensing by a black hole of the same mass. It is argued that lensing effects, being very distinct, may shed some light on the yet unexplained…
Future high precision photometric measurements of transiting extrasolar planets promise to tell us much about the nature of these systems. We examine how atmospheric lensing and (projected) planet oblateness/ellipticity modify transit light…
We discuss the gravitational lensing of neutrinos by astrophysical objects. Unlike photons, neutrinos can cross a stellar core; as a result, the lens quality improves. We also estimate the depletion of the neutrino flux after crossing a…
We study analytically a gravitational lens due to a deformed star, which is modeled by using a monopole and a quadrupole moment. Positions of the images are discussed for a source on the principal axis. We present explicit expressions for…
We consider the effects of mutual transits by extrasolar planet-companion systems (in a true binary or a planet-satellite system) on light curves. We show that induced changes in light curves depend strongly on a ratio between a…
Gravitational lensing caused by the gravitational field of massive objects has been studied and acknowledged for a long period of time. In this paper, however, we propose a different mechanism where the bending of light stems from the…
Gravitational lensing allows us to probe the structure of matter on a broad range of astronomical scales, and as light from a distant source traverses an intervening galaxy, compact matter such as planets, stars, and black holes act as…
Light refracted by the planet's atmosphere is usually ignored in analysis of planetary transits. Here we show that refraction can add shoulders to the transit light curve, i.e., an increase in the observed flux, mostly just before and after…
We study the lensing of neutrinos by astrophysical objects. At the difference of photons, neutrinos can cross a stellar core; as a result the lens quality improves. While Saturnians alone would benefit from this effect in the Sun, similar…
The gravitational lensing of a finite star moving around a rotating Kerr black hole has been numerically calculated. Calculations for the direct image of the star and for the first and second light echoes have been performed for the star…
Gravitational microlensing finds planets through their gravitational influence on the light coming from a more distant background star. The presence of the planet is then inferred from the tell-tale brightness variations of the background…