Related papers: Quasar lensing
Aims: The knowledge of the redshift of a lensing galaxy that produces multiple images of a background quasar is essential to any subsequent modeling, whether related to the determination of the Hubble constant H_0 or to the mass profile of…
Gravitational lensing events provide unique opportunities to discover and study planetary systems and binaries. Here we build on previous work to explore the role that orbital motion can play in both identifying and learning more about…
Gravitational lensing caused by the gravitational field of massive objects has been studied and acknowledged for a long period of time. In this paper, however, we propose a different mechanism where the bending of light stems from the…
Gravitational lensing, a compelling physical phenomenon, offers a unique avenue to investigate the morphology and physical properties of distant and faint celestial objects. This paper seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of the…
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 review results from our monitoring observations of several lensed quasars performed in the optical, UV, and X-ray bands. Modeling of the multi-wavelength light curves provides constraints on the extent of the optical, UV, and X-ray…
Weak gravitational lensing of background galaxies provides a direct probe of the projected matter distribution in and around galaxy clusters. Here we present a self-contained pedagogical review of cluster--galaxy weak lensing, covering a…
Deep surveys planned as a Key Science Project of LOFAR provide completely new opportunities for gravitational lens searches. For the first time do large-scale surveys reach the resolution required for a direct selection of lens candidates…
We report the discovery of five gravitationally lensed quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). All five systems are selected as two-image lensed quasar candidates from a sample of high-redshift (z>2.2) SDSS quasars. We confirmed…
Foreground galaxies that amplify the light from background quasars may also dim that light if the galaxies contain enough dust. Extinction by dust in lenses could hide the large number of lensed systems predicted for a flat universe with a…
Large scale imaging surveys will increase the number of galaxy-scale strong lensing candidates by maybe three orders of magnitudes beyond the number known today. Finding these rare objects will require picking them out of at least tens of…
Exceptionally bright quasars with redshifts up to z=6.28 have recently been discovered. Quasars are thought to be powered by the accretion of gas onto supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies. Their maximum (Eddington) luminosity…
We study gravitational lensing by clusters of galaxies in the context of the generic class of unconventional gravity theories of the scalar--tensor type. For positive energy scalar fields with any dynamics, the bending of light by a weakly…
We use simple comparisons of the optical and radio properties of the wide separation (3'' to 10'') quasar pairs to demonstrate that they are binary quasars rather than gravitational lenses. The most likely model is that all the pairs are…
The traditional perturbative method is applied to the case of gravitational lensing of planetary systems. A complete and detailed description of the structure of caustics for a system with an arbitrary number of planets can be obtained. I…
The observation of the bending of light by mass, now known as gravitational lensing, was key in establishing general relativity as one of the pillars of modern physics. In the past couple of decades, there has been increasing interest in…
The huge luminosity of quasars and "twin''images of them could be explained using filamentary or planar cosmological structures acting as waveguides. We describe the gravitational waveguide theory and then we discuss possible realizations…
We give a non-exhaustive review of the use of strong gravitational lensing in placing constraints on the quantity of dark and visible mass in galaxies. We discuss development of the methodology and summarise some recent results.
Gravitational microlensing of quasars by stars in external galaxies can introduce fluctuations in the centroid of the ``point-like'' macro--images. The induced shifts are extremely small, on micro--arcsecond scales, below the limits of…
A sort of gravitational waveguide effect in cosmology could explain some anomalous phenomena which cannot be understood by the current gravitational lensing models as the existence of "twins" objects with similar spectra and redshifts posed…