Related papers: A GPU-Enabled, High-Resolution Cosmological Microl…
We propose to use a simple observable, the fractional area of "hot spots" in weak lensing mass maps which are detected with high significance, to determine background cosmological parameters. Because these high-shear regions are directly…
Context: The number of known strong gravitational lenses is expected to grow substantially in the next few years. The statistical combination of large samples of lenses has the potential of providing strong constraints on the inner…
Upcoming deep imaging surveys such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time will be confronted with challenges that come with increased depth. One of the leading systematic errors in deep surveys is the blending of…
A recent approach to simulating localized feedback from active galactic nuclei by Power et al. (2011) uses an accretion disc particle to represent both the black hole and its accretion disc. We have extrapolated and adapted this approach to…
This paper discusses the broad science case for obtaining milliarcsecond to microarcsecond astronomical imaging resolution in the soft to medium-energy X-ray band (~0.5 to ~8 keV). Astronomy across much of the electromagnetic spectrum has…
Several gravitationally lensed quasars are observed with anomalous magnifications in pairs of images that straddle a critical curve. Simple theoretical arguments suggest that the magnification of these images should be approximately…
Galactic Exoplanet Survey Telescope (GEST) was proposed for a discovery mission to search for microlensing terrestrial planets toward the Galactic bulge and also Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) that are believed to hold vital information of the…
Cluster-scale strong lensing is a powerful tool for exploring the properties of dark matter and constraining cosmological models. However, due to the complex parameter space, pixelized strong lens modeling in galaxy clusters is…
The Chandra observations of several gravitationally lensed quasars show evidence for flux and spectral variability of the X-ray emission that is uncorrelated between images and is thought to result from the microlensing by stars in the…
We present a prospective analysis of a combined cosmic shear and cosmic microwave background data set, focusing on a Canada France Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) type lensing survey and the current WMAP-1 year and CBI data. We…
At any instant, there are roughly 1000 ongoing microlensing events to sources brighter than 20th magnitude in the Milky Way Galaxy. Large-scale maps of the microlensing optical depth and the mean timescale are constructed for a number of…
We present 13 seasons of $R$-band photometry of the quadruply-lensed quasar WFI 2033-4723 from the 1.3m SMARTS telescope at CTIO and the 1.2m Euler Swiss Telescope at La Silla, in which we detect microlensing variability of $\sim0.2$ mags…
We present an improved inverse ray-shooting code based on GPUs for generating microlensing magnification maps. In addition to introducing GPUs for acceleration, we put the efforts in two aspects: (i) A standard circular lens plane is…
We use statistical inference theory to explore the constraints from future galaxy weak lensing (cosmic shear) surveys combined with the current CMB constraints on cosmological parameters, focusing particularly on the running of the spectral…
Over the past decade, microlensing has developed into a powerful tool to study stellar astrophysics, especially stellar atmospheres, stellar masses, and binarity. I review this progress. Stellar atmospheres can be probed whenever the source…
(Abridged) Weak gravitational lensing induces distortions on the images of background galaxies, and thus provides a direct measure of mass fluctuations in the universe. Since the distortions induced by lensing on the images of background…
In the near future, wide field surveys will discover 1000's of new strongly lensed quasars, and these will be monitored with unprecedented cadence by the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Many of these will undergo caustic-crossing…
We estimate the fraction of mass that is composed of compact objects in gravitational lens galaxies. This study is based on microlensing measurements (obtained from the literature) of a sample of 29 quasar image pairs seen through 20 lens…
We present the results of 15 years of monitoring lensed quasars, which was conducted by the COSMOGRAIL programme at the Leonhard Euler 1.2m Swiss Telescope. The decade-long light curves of 23 lensed systems are presented for the first time.…
Galaxy-galaxy strong lensing provides a powerful probe of galaxy formation, evolution, and the properties of dark matter and dark energy. However, conventional lens-modeling approaches are computationally expensive and require fine-tuning…