Related papers: GERLUMPH Data Release 2: 2.5 billion simulated mic…
We use numerical simulations to test a broad range of plausible observational strategies designed to measure the time delay between the images of gravitationally lensed quasars. Artificial quasar light curves are created along with…
We present a new method to estimate time delays from light curves of lensed quasars. The method is based on chi^2 minimization between the data and a numerical model light curve. A linear variation can be included in order to correct for…
As synoptic all-sky surveys begin to discover new multiply lensed quasars, the flow of data will enable statistical cosmological microlensing studies of sufficient size to constrain quasar accretion disc and supermassive black hole…
As astronomy enters the petascale data era, astronomers are faced with new challenges relating to storage, access and management of data. A shift from the traditional approach of combining data and analysis at the desktop to the use of…
Longtime monitoring of gravitational lens systems is often done using telescopes and recording equipment with modest resolution. Still, it would be interesting to get as much information as possible from the measured lightcurves. From high…
Gravitationally lensed quasars offer a unique opportunity to study cosmological and extragalactic phenomena, using reliable light curves of the lensed images. This requires accurate deblending of the quasar images, which is not trivial due…
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.…
Due to the finite size of the disk and the temperature fluctuations producing the variability, microlensing changes the actual time delays between images of strongly lensed AGN on the $\sim$day(s) light-crossing time scale of the emission…
We introduce a deep machine learning approach to studying quasar microlensing light curves for the first time by analyzing hundreds of thousands of simulated light curves with respect to the accretion disc size and temperature profile. Our…
In this work, we present a homogeneous curve-shifting analysis using the difference-smoothing technique of the publicly available light curves of 24 gravitationally lensed quasars, for which time delays have been reported in the literature.…
In this paper we show that to explain the observed distribution of amplitudes in a large sample of quasar lightcurves, a significant contribution from microlensing is required. This implies the existence of a cosmologically distributed…
Cosmological gravitational microlensing has been proven to be a powerful tool to constrain the structure of multiply imaged quasars, especially the accretion disc and central supermassive black-hole system. However, the derived constraints…
Intensive monitoring campaigns have recently attempted to measure the time delays between multiple images of gravitational lenses. Some of the resulting light-curves show puzzling low-level, rapid variability which is unique to individual…
Lensed quasars and supernovae can be used to study galaxies' gravitational potential and measure cosmological parameters. The typical image separation of objects lensed by galaxies is of the order of 0.5". Therefore, finding the ones with…
We present a novel approach to estimate the time delay between light curves of multiple images in a gravitationally lensed system, based on Kernel methods in the context of machine learning. We perform various experiments with artificially…
The time delays of gravitationally lensed quasars are generally believed to be unique numbers whose measurement is limited only by the quality of the light curves and the models for the contaminating contribution of gravitational…
The gravitational field of a galaxy can act as a lens and deflect the light emitted by a more distant object such as a quasar. Strong gravitational lensing causes multiple images of the same quasar to appear in the sky. Since the light in…
We present a tool to generate mock quasar microlensing light curves and sample them according to any observing strategy. An updated treatment of the fixed and random velocity components of observer, lens, and source is used, together with a…
Owing to the advent of large area photometric surveys, the possibility to use broad band photometric data, instead of spectra, to measure the size of the broad line region of active galactic nuclei, has raised a large interest. We describe…
The microlensing signal in the light curves of gravitationally lensed quasars can shed light on the dark matter (DM) composition in their lensing galaxies. Here, we investigate a sample of six lensed quasars from the most recent and best…