Related papers: Detecting stable massive neutral particles through…
We investigate the chance of detecting proto-planetary or debris disks in stars that induce microlensing events (lenses). The modification of the light curves shapes due to occultation and extinction by the disks as well as the additional…
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…
Strong gravitational lensing provides a geometric probe of cosmology in a unique manner through distance ratios involving the source and lens. This is well known for the time delay distance derived from measured delays between lightcurves…
We propose a new method to detect the gravitational lenses in the ongoing microlensing experiments using medium and high resolution spectroscopy (resolution > 6000). Since the radial velocity of the lens and lensed source typically differs…
The biggest uncertainty in determining microlensing parameters comes from the blending of source star images because the current experiments are being carried out toward very dense star fields: the Galactic bulge and Magellanic Clouds. The…
Current theories of structure formation predict specific density profiles of galaxy dark matter haloes, and with weak gravitational lensing we can probe these profiles on several scales. On small scales, higher-order shape distortions known…
Microlensing surveys search for the transient brightening of a background star that is the signature of gravitational lensing by a foreground compact object. This technique is an elegant way to search for astrophysical candidates that might…
We investigate how observations of strong lensing can be used to infer cosmological parameters, in particular the equation of state of dark energy. We focus on the growth of the critical lines of lensing clusters with the source redshift as…
When a source star is gravitationally microlensed by a dark lens, the centroid of the source star image is displaced relative to the position of the unlensed source star with an elliptical trajectory. Recently, routine astrometric follow-up…
Weak gravitational lensing observations probe the spectrum and evolution of density fluctuations and the cosmological parameters which govern them. The non-linear evolution of large scale structure produces a non-Gaussian signal which is…
Weak gravitational lensing observations probe the spectrum and evolution of density fluctuations and the cosmological parameters which govern them but are currently limited to small fields and subject to selection biases. We show how the…
Recent studies have demonstrated that detailed monitoring of gravitational microlensing events can reveal the presence of planets orbiting the microlensed source stars. With the potential of probing planets in the Galactic Bulge and…
We propose to use a simple observable, the fractional area of "hot spots" in weak gravitational lensing mass maps which are detected with high significance, to determine background cosmological parameters. Because these high-convergence…
Heavy neutral leptons are present in many well-motivated beyond the Standard Model theories, sometimes being accessible at present colliders. Depending on their masses and couplings they could be long-lived and lead to events with displaced…
We speculate on some novel consequences possibly associated with a change of elementary particle constants with time. These concern the question as to whether particles reaching the earth from distant parts of the universe reflect their…
The inference of the Milky Way halo mass requires modelling the phase space structure of dynamical tracers, with different tracers following different models and having different levels of sensitivity to the halo mass. For steady-state…
To detect brown dwarfs in the dark galactic halo through gravitational lensing, experiments follow the luminosity of millions of stars to observe a few lensing events par year. The luminosity of a star too faint to be continuously followed…
It has been shown by Paczy\'nski that gravitational microlensing is potentially a useful method for detecting the dark constituents of the halo of our galaxy, if their mass lies in the approximate domain $10^{-6}<M/M_\odot<10^{-1}$.…
It is well-established that strong bars rotating in dense halos generally slow down as they lose angular momentum to the halo through dynamical friction. Angular momentum exchanges between the bar and halo particles take place at…
Microlensings events are predicted for the light coming from cosmological sources. In addition to the microlensing due to gravitation lensing, microlensing produced also by refraction of light due to either ionized, or not, gas clouds can…