Related papers: Gravitational Microlensing I: A Unique Astrophysic…
Gravitational lensing is now widely and successfully used to study a range of astronomical phenomena, from individual objects, like galaxies and clusters, to the mass distribution on various scales, to the overall geometry of the Universe.…
We review recent gravitational microlensing results from the EROS, MACHO, and OGLE collaborations, and present some details of the very latest MACHO results toward the Galactic Bulge. The MACHO collaboration has now discovered in excess of…
The MACHO project carries out regular photometric monitoring of millions of stars in the Magellanic Clouds and Galactic Bulge, to search for very rare gravitational microlensing events due to compact objects in the galactic halo and disk. A…
We report a significant detection of weak, tangential distortion of the images of cosmologically distant, faint galaxies due to gravitational lensing by foreground galaxies. A mean image polarisation of $<p>=0.011\pm 0.006$ is measured for…
Gravitational lensing of background compact objects like active galactic nuclei and quasars, by extended intermediate mass lenses such as globular clusters and and dark matter clumps with masses 10^5 - 10^8 M_sun, is considered. It is shown…
Using the astrometry of microlensing events we study the effect of angular momentum as compared to that of the parallax. For a rotating lens it is shown that the effect of the angular momentum deviates the center of images from that in the…
Galaxy clusters as gravitational lenses play a unique role in astrophysics and cosmology: they permit mapping the dark matter distribution on a range of scales; they reveal the properties of high and intermediate redshift background…
The existence of a massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, coinciding with the radio source Sgr A*, is being established on more and more solid ground. In principle, this black hole, acting as a gravitational lens, is able to…
We present a potential test of the origin of the $\gamma$-ray Galactic Centre Excess (GCE). We demonstrate how gravitational microlensing by stellar mass objects along the line of sight to the Galactic Bulge can distinguish between the…
We present follow-up observations of a gravitational microlensing candidate found by the MACHO collaboration in the Galactic bulge. The photometric data cover a period near the maximum of the event and may be used to construct complete…
Massive structures, such as galaxies, act as strong gravitational lenses on background sources. When the background source is a quasar, several lensed images are seen, as magnified or de-magnified versions of the same object. The detailed…
The weak gravitational lensing of high redshift type Ia supernovae has the potential of probing the structure of matter on galaxy halo scales. This is complementary to the weak lensing of galaxies which probes structure of larger scales.…
It is estimated that a star brighter than visual magnitude 17 is undergoing a detectable gravitational microlensing event, somewhere on the sky, at any given time. It is assumed that both lenses and sources are normal stars drawn from a…
Gravitational lenses are a unique new constraint on the structure of galaxies. We review the evidence that most lenses are early-type galaxies, the optical properties of the lens galaxies, the evidence against constant M/L models, recent…
Microlensing of stars in strongly lensed galaxies can lead to temporary extreme magnification factors ($\mu\!>\!1000$), enabling their detection at high redshifts. Following the discovery of Icarus, several stars at cosmological distances…
We present results from a search for gravitational microlensing of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud by low mass objects in the Galactic Halo. The search uses the CCD light curves of about 82,000 stars with up to 46 measurements per night…
We present an analysis of the large set of microlensing events detected so far toward the Galactic center with the purpose of investigating whether some of the dark lenses are located in Galactic globular clusters. We find that in four…
We consider a contribution of microlensing in X-ray variability of high-redshifted QSOs. Such an effect could be caused by stellar mass objects (SMO) located in a bulge or/and in a halo of this quasar as well as at cosmological distances…
Gravitational microlensing, the lensing of stars in the Milky Way galaxy with other stars, has been used for exploring compact dark matter objects, exoplanets, and black holes. The duration of microlensing events, the so-called Einstein…
The main aim of microlensing experiments is to evaluate the mean mass of massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) and the mass fraction of the Galactic halo made by this type of dark matter. Statistical analysis shows that by considering a…