Related papers: Lensing by a singular isothermal sphere and a blac…
In this article, we study regular scale-dependent black holes as gravitational lenses. We obtain the deflection angle in the strong deflection limit, from which we calculate the positions and the magnifications of the relativistic images.…
Strong gravitational lensing from black holes results in the formation of relativistic images, in particular, relativistic Einstein rings. For objects with event horizons, the radius of the unstable light ring (photon sphere) is the lowest…
A standard method to study the mass distribution in galaxy clusters is through strong lensing of background galaxies in which the positions of multiple images of the same source constrain the surface mass distribution of the cluster.…
Spherically symmetric black holes produce, by strong field lensing, two infinite series of relativistic images, formed by light rays winding around the black hole at distances comparable to the gravitational radius. In this paper, we…
The second-generation beam combiner at the Very Large Telescope (VLT), GRAVITY, observes the stars orbiting the compact object located at the center of our galaxy, with an unprecedented astrometric accuracy of 10 $\mu$as. The nature of this…
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…
Criticality in graviational microlensing is an everyday issue because that is what generates microlensing signals which may be of photon-challenged compact objects such as black holes or planetary systems ET calls home. The criticality of…
We discuss the kinematical structure of a two-parameter family of isotropic models with a central black hole. The family contains the slope of the central density cusp and the relative black hole mass as parameters. Most of the basic…
The Teukolsky equation describing scattering from Kerr black holes captures a few important effects in the process of binary mergers, such as tidal deformations and the decay of ringdown modes, thereby raising interest in the structure of…
If stars at the lower end of the main sequence are responsible for the microlensing events observed in the Galactic bulge, then light from the lensing star contributes to the observed brightness. The background and lensing stars generally…
We study the gravitational microlensing of various static and spherically symmetric non-singular black holes (and horizonless, non-singular compact objects of similar size). For pointlike sources we extend the parametrized post-Newtonian…
Galaxy clusters as gravitational lenses play a unique role in astrophysics and cosmology: they permit mapping the dark matter distribution on a range of scales; they reveal the properties of high and intermediate redshift background…
The statistics of black holes and their masses strongly suggests that their mass distribution has a cutoff towards lower masses near $3 \times 10^{6}$ M$_{\odot}$. This is consistent with a classical formation mechanism from the…
Models of superdense star clusters at the center of galaxies are investigated to see whether such objects can be stable and long-lived based on evaporation and collision time-scales and stability criteria. We find that physically reasonable…
We consider the origin of the so-called S stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the very center of the Galaxy. These are usually assumed to be massive main-sequence stars. We argue instead that they are the remnants of…
The centers of most galaxies contain massive black holes surrounded by dense star clusters. The structure of these clusters determines the rate and properties of observable transient events, such as flares from tidally disrupted stars and…
We investigate gravitational lensing by a primary photon sphere which is a sphere filled with unstable circular light orbits, and by a secondary photon sphere on a wormhole throat in a black-bounce spacetime which is suggested in [F. S. N.…
The magnification of distant sources by mass clumps at lower ($z \leq 1$) redshifts is calculated analytically. The clumps are initially assumed to be galaxy group isothermal spheres with properties inferred from an extensive survey. The…
We investigate high-magnification events caused by planets in wide binary stellar systems under the strong finite-source effect, where the planet orbits one of the companions. From this, we find that the pattern of central perturbations in…
Luminous stars in background galaxies straddling the lensing caustic of a foreground galaxy cluster can be individually detected due to extreme magnification factors of $\sim 10^2$--$10^3$, as recently observed in deep HST images. We…