Related papers: Diffractive Microlensing: A New Probe of the Local…
Gravitational lensing magnification is maximal around caustics. At these source locations, an incoming wave from a point source would formally experience an infinite amplification in the high-frequency or geometric optics limit. This…
In this article we review the astrophysical application of gravitational microlensing. After introducing the history of gravitational lensing, we present the key equations and concept of microlensing. The most frequent microlensing events…
Gravitational waves (GWs) from distant sources such as inspiralling and merging stellar-mass compact binaries, intermediate-mass and supermassive-binary-black-hole can be gravitationally lensed by intervening objects, ranging from stars and…
We investigate the feasibility of extracting the gravitational nanolensing signal due to the presence of subsolar mass halos within galaxy-sized dark matter halos. We show that subsolar mass halos in a lensing galaxy can cause strong…
Microlensing events are now regularly being detected by monitoring the flux of a large number of potential sources and measuring the combined magnification of the images. This phenomenon could also be detected directly from the…
When it comes to long-wavelength gravitational waves (GWs), diffraction effect becomes significant when these waves are lensed by celestial bodies. Typically, the traditional diffraction integral formula neglects large-angle diffraction,…
We estimate the optical depth, time-scale distribution and fraction of microlensing events originating from sources in the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy (Sgr) lensed by deflectors in the Milky Way. These events have a time-scale longer by a…
A small fraction of all quasars are strongly lensed and multiply imaged, with usually a galaxy acting as the main lens. Some, maybe all of these quasars are also affected by microlensing, the effects of stellar mass objects in the lensing…
We define a second-order moment of the observational differential microlensing curves that can be used to impose constraints on physical properties of lensed quasars. We show that this quantity is sensitive both to variations in the source…
Many distant objects can only be detected, or become more scientifically valuable, if they have been highly magnified by strong gravitational lensing. We use EAGLE and BAHAMAS, two recent cosmological hydrodynamical simulations, to predict…
Motivated by debris disk studies, we investigate the gravitational microlensing of background starlight by a planetesimal disk around a foreground star. We use dynamical survival models to construct a plausible example of a planetesimal…
We use a series of ray-tracing experiments to determine the magnification distribution of high-redshift sources by gravitational lensing. We determine empirically the relation between magnification and redshift, for various cosmological…
The gravitational microlensing light curves that reveal the presence of extrasolar planets generally yield the planet-star mass ratio and separation in units of the Einstein ring radius. The microlensing method does not require the…
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…
The simple physics of microlensing provides a well-understood tool with which to probe the atmospheres of distant stars in the Galaxy and Local Group with high magnification and resolution. Recent results in measuring stellar surface…
Weak gravitational lensing of distant galaxies can probe the total projected mass distribution of foreground gravitational structures on all scales and has been used successfully to map the projected mass distribution of rich intermediate…
Gravitational lensing provides a means to measure mass that does not rely on detecting and analysing light from the lens itself. Compact objects are ideal gravitational lenses, because they have relatively large masses and are dim. In this…
We investigate the microlensing effects on a source star surrounded by a circumstellar disk, as a function of wavelength. The microlensing light curve of the system encodes the geometry and surface brightness profile of the disk. In the…
Occultation and microlensing are different limits of the same phenomena of one body passing in front of another body. We derive a general exact analytic expression which describes both microlensing and occultation in the case of spherical…
The standard light curve of a microlensing event provides only two constraints on the six unknown parameters of the lens. We show that narrow-band photometry during a microlensing event of a giant star can in addition determine the angular…