Related papers: Polarimetry microlensing of close-in planetary sys…
In gravitational microlensing, binary systems may act as lenses or sources. Identifying lens binarity is generally easy especially in events characterized by caustic crossing since the resulting light curve exhibits strong deviations from…
Chang-Refsdal (C-R) lensing, which refers to the gravitational lensing of a point mass perturbed by a constant external shear, provides a good approximation in describing lensing behaviors of either a very wide or a very close binary lens.…
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…
After decades of searching, the true nature of dark matter still eludes us. One potential probe of the form of dark matter in galaxy clusters is to search for microlensing variability in the giant arcs and arclets. In this paper, a simple…
In contrast to photometric transits, whose peak signal occurs at mid-transit due to occultation of the brightest region of the disk, polarimetric transits provide a signal upon ingress and egress due to occultation of the polarized stellar…
We introduce a new method of searching for and characterizing extra-solar planets. We show that by monitoring the center-of-light motion of microlensing alerts using the next generation of high precision astrometric instruments the…
Since the first microlensing planet discovery in 2003, more than 200 planets have been detected with gravitational microlensing, in addition to several free-floating planet and black hole candidates. In this chapter the microlensing theory…
Detecting compact objects by means of their gravitational lensing effect on an observed companion in a binary system has already been suggested almost four decades ago. However, these predictions were made even before the first observations…
If a gravitational microlensing event is caused by a widely separated binary lens and the source approaches both lens components, the source flux is successively magnified by the individual lenses: double microlensing events. If events are…
During the months when the galactic bulge is visible from the southern hemisphere, there are typically about 8 to 10 on-going microlensing events at any given time. If the lensing stars have planets around them, then the signature of the…
One possibility for detecting low-amplitude pulsational variations is through gravitational microlensing. During a microlensing event, the temporary brightness increase leads to improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio, and thereby better…
A galaxy cluster acts as a cosmic telescope over background galaxies but also as a cosmic microscope of the lens imperfections. The diverging magnification of lensing caustics enhances the microlensing effect of substructure present within…
More than 100 microlensing events have been detected during the last ~4 years, most of them towards the Galactic Bulge. Since the line of sight towards the Bulge passes through the disk and the Bulge itself, the known stars towards the…
Detection of quasi-monochromatic, long-duration (continuous) gravitational wave radiation emitted by, e.g., asymmetric rotating neutron stars in our Galaxy requires a long observation time to distinguish it from the detector's noise. If…
Here, we revisit the polarization signal in caustic-crossing binary microlensing and introduce the maps of the polarization signals of the source star as a function of its position projected on the lens plane. The behavior of these maps…
Gaudi, Naber & Sackett pointed out that if an event is caused by a lens system containing more than two planets, all planets will affect the central region of the magnification pattern, and thus the existence of the multiple planets can be…
Polarization is a basic property of light and is fundamentally linked to the internal geometry of a source of radiation. Polarimetry complements photometric, spectroscopic, and imaging analyses of sources of radiation and has made possible…
In laser gravitational waves detectors optical loss restricts sensitivity. We discuss polarization scattering as one more possible mechanism of optical losses. Circulated inside interferometer light is polarized and after reflection its…
Polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) brings out information not only on the early universe but also on the late-time large-scale structure via weak gravitational lensing. Here, we show that circular polarization is induced…
The circular polarization of light that planets reflect is often neglected because it is very small compared to the linear polarization. It could, however, provide information on a planet's atmosphere and surface, and on the presence of…