Related papers: Lensing by a singular isothermal sphere and a blac…
Many multiply--imaged quasars have been found over the years, but none so far with image separation in excess of $8\arcsec$. The absence of such large splittings has been used as a test of cosmological models: the standard Cold Dark Matter…
Of order one in 10^3 quasars and high-redshift galaxies appears in the sky as multiple images as a result of gravitational lensing by unrelated galaxies and clusters that happen to be in the foreground. While the basic phenomenon is a…
Gravitational lensing is the phenomenon arising when light rays are deflected by the mass between the source and the observer. Largely magnified and highly distorted images of background galaxies are formed by these angular deflections if…
We describe the feasibility of detecting the gravitational deflection of light emitted by stars moving under the influence of the massive object at the Galactic center. Light emitted by a star orbiting behind the central mass has a smaller…
We model massive compact objects in galactic nuclei as stationary, axially-symmetric naked singularities in the Einstein-massless scalar field theory and study the resulting gravitational lensing. In the weak deflection limit we study…
We study strong gravitational lensing by spiral galaxies, modeling them as infinitely thin uniform disks embedded in singular isothermal spheres. We derive general properties of the critical curves and caustics analytically. The…
Recent observations indicate that many if not all galaxies host massive central black holes (BHs). In this paper we explore the influence of supermassive binary black holes (SMBBHs) on their actions as gravitational lenses. When lenses are…
In gravitational lensing, central images in quads can serve as a powerful probe of the inner regions of lens galaxies. The presence of an offset central supermassive black hole (SMBH) has the potential to distort the time-delay surface in a…
The distortion of the spacetime structure in the surroundings of black holes affects the trajectories of light rays. As a consequence, black holes can act as gravitational lenses. Observations of type Ia supernovas, show that our Universe…
The gravitational field of supermassive black holes is able to strongly bend light rays emitted by nearby sources. When the deflection angle exceeds $\pi$, gravitational lensing can be analytically approximated by the so-called strong…
This is a pedagogical review of recent results on the interactions of central massive black holes with stars very near them, focused on the black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Table of contents: [1] Introduction [2] Stellar dynamics…
We have worked out simple analytical formulae that accurately approximate the relationship between the position of the source with respect to the lens center and the amplification of the images, hence the lens cross section, for realistic…
There are expected to be millions of isolated black holes in the Galaxy resulting from the death of massive stars. Measuring the abundance and properties of this remnant population would shed light on the end stages of stellar evolution and…
The characteristic and distinctive features of the visibility amplitude of interferometric observations for compact objects like stars in the immediate vicinity of the central black hole in our Galaxy are considered. These features are…
The central regions of galaxies show the presence of massive black holes and/or dense stellar systems. The question about their modes of formation is still under debate. A likely explanation of the formation of the central dense stellar…
Among the 25 planetary systems detected up to now by gravitational microlensing, there are two cases of a star with two planets, and two cases of a binary star with a planet. Other, yet undetected types of triple lenses include triple stars…
Recent observations and stellar dynamics simulations suggest that thousand solar mass black holes can form in compact massive young star clusters. Any such clusters in the bulge of their host galaxy will spiral to the center within a few…
Recent observations show a population of active galaxies with milliarcseconds offsets between optical and radio emission. Such offsets can be an indication of extreme phenomena associated with supermassive black holes including relativistic…
The effect of stars on the lensing properties of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center is similar to the effect of planets on microlensing by a star. We show that the dense stellar cluster around SgrA* increases by factors of a…
We study moderate gravitational lensing where a background galaxy is magnified substantially, but not multiply imaged, by an intervening galaxy. We focus on the case where both the lens and source are elliptical galaxies. The signatures of…