Related papers: Cosmic String Loop Microlensing
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 study the spectrum of loops as a part of a complete network of cosmic strings in flat spacetime. After a long transient regime, characterized by production of small loops at the scale of the initial conditions, it appears that a true…
We study the evolution of cosmic strings taking into account the frictional force due to the surrounding radiation. We consider small perturbations on straight strings, oscillation of circular loops and small perturbations on circular…
Gravitational lensing describes the bending of the trajectories of light and gravitational waves due to the gravitational potential of a massive object. Strong lensing by galaxies can create multiple images with different overall…
Weak gravitational lensing induces flux dependent fluctuations in the observed galaxy number density distribution. This cosmic magnification (magnification bias) effect in principle enables lensing reconstruction alternative to cosmic shear…
Cosmic string loops contain cusps which decay by emitting bursts of particles. A significant fraction of the released energy is in the form of photons. These photons are injected non-thermally and can hence cause spectral distortions of the…
The strong galaxy-galaxy lensing produces highly magnified and distorted images of background galaxies in the form of arcs and Einstein rings. Statistically, these effects are quantified, for example, in the number counts of highly luminous…
Particle emission, in addition to gravitational radiation from cosmic string loops, affects the resulting loop distribution and hence the corresponding observational consequences of cosmic strings. Here we focus on two models in which loops…
Doppler lensing is the apparent change in object size and magnitude due to peculiar velocities. Objects falling into an overdensity appear larger on its near side, and smaller on its far side, than typical objects at the same redshifts.…
We extend our earlier model of the small scale structure of cosmic string networks through an improved treatment of the separation of long and short scales. We find that the production of small loops (at the gravitational radiation scale)…
Gravitational microlensing surveys target very dense stellar fields in the local group. As a consequence the microlensed source stars are often blended with nearby unresolved stars. The presence of `blending' is a cause of major uncertainty…
The mean spectrum and burst statistics of gravitational waves produced by a cosmological population of cosmic string loops are estimated using analytic approximations, calibrated with earlier simulations. Formulas are derived showing the…
We present the properties of a cosmic superstring network in the scenario of flux compactification. An infinite family of strings, the (p,q)-strings, are allowed to exist. The flux compactification leads to a string tension that is periodic…
A general formulation for describing odd-harmonic cosmic strings is developed and used to determine the self-intersection properties of high-harmonic loops. This is important because loop formation mechanisms produce high-harmonic…
Cosmic strings, a hot subject in the 1980's and early 1990's, lost its appeal when it was found that it leads to inconsistencies in the power spectrum of the measured cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropies. However,…
We report on a program of spectroscopic observations of gravitationally-lensed QSOs with multiple images. We seek to establish whether microlensing is occurring in each QSO image using only single-epoch observations. We calculate flux…
We investigate high-magnification events caused by planets in wide binary stellar systems under the strong finite-source effect, where the planet orbits one of the companions. From this, we find that the pattern of central perturbations in…
Applications of the phase space approach to the calculation of the microlensing autocorrelation function are presented. The continuous propagation equation for a random star field with a Gaussian velocity distribution is solved in the…
We present a rigorous, detailed study of the generic, quantitative properties of gravitational microlensing near cusp catastrophes. We derive explicit formulas for the total magnification and centroid of the images created for sources…
We investigate the weak gravitational lensing effect due to the large-scale structure of the universe on two-point correlations of local maxima ({\em hotspots}) in the 2D sky map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy.…