Related papers: Dark matter under the microscope: Constraining com…
The recent discovery of fast transient events near critical curves of massive galaxy clusters, which are interpreted as highly magnified individual stars in giant arcs due to caustic crossing, opens up the possibility of using such…
Supermagnified stars are gravitationally lensed individual stars that are located close to a caustic of a lensing galaxy cluster, and have their flux magnified by a large enough factor (typically ~ 1000) to make them detectable with present…
Observations of caustic-crossing galaxies at redshift $0.7<z<1$ show a wealth of transient events. Most of them are believed to be microlensing events of highly magnified stars. Earlier work predicted such events should be common near the…
Microlensing near macro-caustics is a complex phenomenon in which swarms of micro-images produced by micro-caustics form on both sides of a macro-critical curve. Recent discoveries of highly magnified images of individual stars in massive…
Luminous stars in background galaxies straddling the lensing caustic of a foreground galaxy cluster can be individually detected due to extreme magnification factors of $\sim 10^2$--$10^3$, as recently observed in deep HST images. We…
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…
Caustic-crossing stars observed in giant arcs behind galaxy clusters provide a powerful probe of dark matter substructure. While previous work has focused on point-like lenses such as primordial black holes, we extend this framework to…
We show how observations of multiply-imaged quasars at high redshift can be used as a probe of dark matter clumps (subhalos with masses ~ 10^9 solar masses) within the virialized extent of more massive lensing halos. A large abundance of…
Microlensing studies of quasars can reveal dark matter lumps over a broad mass spectrum; we highlight the importance of monitoring quasars which are seen through the halos of low-redshift galaxies. For these configurations microlensing by…
The galaxy cluster Abell 2152 is recently found to be forming a cluster-cluster system with another, more distant cluster whose core is almost perfectly aligned to that of A2152. We discuss the detectability of microlensing events where a…
Direct evidence for the existence of dark matter and measurements of its interaction cross-section have been provided by the physical offset between dark matter and intra- cluster gas in merging systems like the Bullet Cluster. Although a…
Stars in globular clusters can act either as sources for MACHOs (Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects) located along the line of sight or as lenses for more distant background stars. Although the expected rate of microlensing events…
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…
Strong gravitational lensing offers a powerful probe of the detailed distribution of matter in lenses, while magnifying and bringing faint background sources into view. Observed strong lensing by massive galaxy clusters, which are often in…
The dark matter in Galactic halos, or some fraction of it, may be in the form of dark clusters which consist of small mass objects. Carr & Lacey (1987) have derived the permissible properties of such systems, and proposed the existence of…
Cold dark matter (CDM) constitutes most of the matter in the Universe. The interplay between dark and luminous matter in dense cosmic environments like galaxy clusters is studied theoretically using cosmological simulations. Observed…
It is widely recognized that cold dark matter models predict abundant dark matter substructure in halos of all sizes. Galaxy-galaxy lensing provides a unique opportunity to directly measure the presence and the mass of such substructures in…
We assess how much unused strong lensing information is available in the deep \emph{Hubble Space Telescope} imaging and VLT/MUSE spectroscopy of the \emph{Frontier Field} clusters. As a pilot study, we analyse galaxy cluster…
The properties of substructure in galaxy clusters, exquisitely probed by gravitational lensing, offer a stringent test of dark matter (DM) models. Combining strong- and weak-lensing data for massive clusters, we map their total mass --…
The bulk of stars in galaxy clusters are confined within their constituent galaxies. Those stars do not trace the extended distribution of dark matter well as they are located in the central regions of the cluster's dark matter sub-halos. A…