Related papers: The Universe at extreme magnification
We have monitored 8.6 million stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud for 1.1 years and have found 3 events consistent with gravitational microlensing. We place strong constraints on the Galactic halo content in the form of compact lensing…
Massive stars play a major role in the evolution of their host galaxies, and serve as important probes of the distant Universe. It has been established that the majority of massive stars reside in close binaries and will interact with their…
The ultimate fate of the universe, infinite expansion or a big crunch, can be determined by measuring the redshifts, apparent brightnesses, and intrinsic luminosities of very distant supernovae. Recent developments have provided tools that…
One of the most direct routes for investigating the geometry of the Universe is provided by the numbers of strongly magnified gravitationally lensed galaxies as compared with those that are either weakly magnified or de-magnified. In the…
For a wide variety of cosmological models characterized by the cosmic mass density $\Omega_M$ and the normalized cosmological constant $\Omega_{\Lambda}$, we derive an analytic expression for the estimate of magnification cross-sections by…
We investigate gravitational lensing by a realistic model of disk galaxies. Most of the mass is contained in a large spherical isothermal dark matter halo, but the potential is modified significantly in the core by a…
We review some of the possible observable effects (reionization, feedback on galaxy formation, supernovae and metal enrichment) of the first collapsed, luminous (Pop III) objects in the universe. We show that supernovae in these objects…
Paczy\'nski (1986) suggested that ``dark" objects in the halo of our Galaxy could enhance the luminosity of foreground stars, acting as gravitational microlenses. Such events has been recently reported by different collaborations. We assume…
Highly magnified individual stars such as Icarus and Earendel have recently been observed near critical curves of galaxy clusters with Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations. These stars are estimated to be magnified with a factor of…
Strong gravitational lensing and microlensing of supernovae (SNe) are emerging as a new probe of cosmology and astrophysics in recent years. We provide an overview of this nascent research field, starting with a summary of the first…
Gravitational lensing describes the bending of the trajectories of light and gravitational waves due to the gravitational potential of a massive object. Strong lensing by galaxies can create multiple images with different overall…
In this paper we study gravitational lensing of gravitational wave events. The main point of the present work is to introduce a semi-analytic approach so that each ingredient can be varied and tested individually. Our analytic model for the…
We use the non-observation of strong lensing of gravitational waves (GWs) in the first three observation runs of LIGO-Virgo detectors to constrain the fraction of dark matter in the form of compact objects in the mass range…
Short duration lensing events tend to be generated by low-mass lenses or by lenses with high transverse velocities. Furthermore, for any given lens mass and speed, events of short duration are preferentially caused by nearby lenses…
If a significant fraction of dark matter is in the form of compact objects, they will cause microlensing effects in the gravitational wave (GW) signals observable by LIGO and Virgo. From the non-observation of microlensing signatures in the…
Astrophysical implications of gravitational microlensing of gravitational waves emitted by rotating neutron stars (NSs) are investigated. In particular, attention is focused on the following situations: i) NSs in the galactic bulge lensed…
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…
Compound strong gravitational lensing is a rare phenomenon, but a handful of such lensed systems are likely to be discovered in forthcoming surveys. In this work, we use a double SIS lens model to analytically understand how the properties…
Objects of known brightness, like Type Ia supernovae (SNIa), can be used to measure distances. If a massive object warps spacetime to form multiple images of a background SNIa, a direct test of cosmic expansion is also possible. However,…
The observed number counts of high-redshift galaxy candidates have been used to build up a statistical description of star-forming activity at redshift z >~ 7, when galaxies reionized the Universe. Standard models predict that a high…