Related papers: The Universe at extreme magnification
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…
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…
Hundreds of gravitational microlensing events have now been detected towards the Galactic bulge, with many more to come. The detection of fine structure in these events has been theorized to be an excellent way to discover extra-solar…
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…
Superluminous supernovae have been proposed to arise from Population III progenitors that explode as pair-instability supernovae. Pop III stars are the first generation of stars in the Universe, and are thought to form as late as $z \sim…
We study the gravitational lensing magnification produced by the intervening cosmological matter distribution, as deduced from three different hierarchical models (SCDM, LCDM, CHDM) on very high redshift sources, particularly supernovae in…
Large magnification factors near gravitational lensing caustics of galaxy cluster lenses allow the study of individual stars or compact stellar associations at cosmological distances. We study how the presence of sub-galactic subhalos, an…
We consider small-scale spheroidal clusters of weakly interacting massive particles in our Galaxy as non-compact gravitational microlenses and predict the appearance of caustics in the plane of a lensed source. The crossing of these…
Recent rapid progress in time domain surveys makes it possible to detect various types of explosive transients in the Universe in large numbers, some of which will be gravitationally lensed into multiple images. Although a large number of…
Gravitational microlensing is a robust tool to detect and directly measure the abundance and mass of any kind of compact objects, either in our galaxy or in the extragalatic domain. On basis to generic, broadly applicable arguments, it is…
We discuss some aspects concerning the formation and the impact of the first luminous structures in the universe (PopIIIs), with particular emphasis on their feedback effects on subsequent galaxy formation. We argue that supernovae in these…
It is shown that a significant amount of detectable gravitational microlensing events that could potentially be found by MAssively Parallel Photometry (MAPP) projects (such as the MACHO, EROS and OGLE collaborations) will occur for stars…
The effect of stars on the lensing properties of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center is similar to the effect of planets on microlensing by a star. We show that the dense stellar cluster around SgrA* increases by factors of a…
Extreme microlensing events, defined as events with maximum magnification $A_\max\gsim 200$ are a potentially powerful probe of the mass spectrum and spatial distribution of objects along lines of sight toward the Galactic bulge. About 75…
Gravitational lensing can amplify the apparent brightness of distant sources. Images that are highly magnified are often part of multiply-imaged systems, but we consider the possibility of having large magnifications without additional…
There is now abundant evidence for the presence of large quantities of unseen matter surrounding normal galaxies, including our own$^{1,2}$. The nature of this `dark matter' is unknown, except that it cannot be made of normal stars, dust,…
Many distant objects can only be detected, or become more scientifically valuable, if they have been highly magnified by strong gravitational lensing. We use EAGLE and BAHAMAS, two recent cosmological hydrodynamical simulations, to predict…
Recent observations of lensed galaxies at cosmological distances have detected individual stars that are extremely magnified when crossing the caustics of lensing clusters. In idealized cluster lenses with smooth mass distributions, two…
The two outer triangular caustics (regions of infinite magnification) of a close binary microlens move much faster than the components of the binary themselves, and can even exceed the speed of light. When $\epsilon > 1$, where $\epsilon c$…
Gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters can create extreme magnification near the cluster caustics, thereby enabling detection of individual luminous stars in high-redshift background galaxies. Those stars can include non-explosive…