Related papers: Understanding micro-image configurations in quasar…
Strong gravitational lensing distorts our view of sources at cosmological distances but brings invaluable constraints on the mass content of foreground objects and on the geometry and properties of the Universe. We report the detection of a…
Dark matter may be in the form of non-baryonic structures such as compact subhalos and boson stars. Structures weighing between asteroid and solar masses may be discovered via gravitational microlensing, an astronomical probe that has in…
Many binary systems are in a state of strong interaction, where mass exchanges, accretion disks, common envelopes provide circumstellar matter which can have significant effects in microlensing light curves of background sources. Such…
Flux ratio `anomalies' in quadruply-imaged gravitational lenses can be explained with galactic substructure of the sort predicted by CDM, but the strength and uniqueness of that hypothesis needs to be further assessed. A good way to do that…
Time-delay cosmography in strongly lensed quasars offer an independent way of measuring the Hubble constant, $H_0$. However, it has been proposed that the combination of microlensing and source-size effects, also known as microlensing time…
The gravity due to a multiple-mass system has a remarkable gravitational effect: the extreme magnification of background light sources along extended so-called caustic lines. This property has been the channel for some remarkable…
Weak-lensing distortions of the cosmic-microwave-background (CMB) temperature and polarization patterns can reveal important clues to the intervening large-scale structure. The effect of lensing is to deflect the primary temperature and…
Strongly lensed systems with peculiar configurations allow us to probe the local properties of the deflecting lens mass while simultaneously testing general profile assumptions. The quasar HE0230$-$2130 is lensed by two galaxies at similar…
Geometrical optics provides an excellent description for quasar images crossing caustics which are formed by gravitational microlensing of objects like Q2237+0305. Within this approximation the source size can be estimated from the maximum…
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…
While most strong-gravitational-lensing systems may be roughly modelled by a single massive object between the source and the observer, in the details all the structures near the light path contribute to the observed images. These…
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…
We propose a general theoretical scheme for the investigation of light emitted from nano- and micrometric structures of arbitrary shape and composition. More specifically, the proposed fully three-dimensional approach allows to derive the…
Lensed quasars and supernovae can be used to study galaxies' gravitational potential and measure cosmological parameters. The typical image separation of objects lensed by galaxies is of the order of 0.5". Therefore, finding the ones with…
Microlensing observations have now become a useful tool in searching for non--luminous astrophysical compact objects (brown dwarfs, faint stars, neutron stars, black holes and even planets). Originally conceived for establishing whether the…
Several observational analyses suggest that matter is spatially structured at $\approx 130h^{-1}Mpc$ at low redshifts. This peak in the power spectrum provides a standard ruler in comoving space which can be used to compare the local…
We report on a program of spectroscopic observations of gravitationally-lensed QSOs with multiple images. We seek to establish whether microlensing is occurring in each QSO image using only single-epoch observations. We calculate flux…
The quark matter may have great implications in astrophysical studies, which could appear in the early Universe, in compact stars, and/or as cosmic rays. After a general review of astrophysical quark matter, the density-dominated quark…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) represents a unique source for the study of gravitational lensing. It is extended across the entire sky, partially polarized, located at the extreme distance of z=1100, and is thought to have the…
Effects of macro-and microlensing on the spatial and temporal characteristics of images of remote sources, observed through the inner regions of lensing galaxies are discussed. A particular attention was given to the case, when microlenses,…