Related papers: The Universe at extreme magnification
The detection of Pop III supernovae could directly probe the primordial IMF for the first time, unveiling the properties of the first galaxies, early chemical enrichment and reionization, and the seeds of supermassive black holes. Growing…
Recent observations show a population of active galaxies with milliarcseconds offsets between optical and radio emission. Such offsets can be an indication of extreme phenomena associated with supermassive black holes including relativistic…
The flux from distant type Ia supernovae (SN) is likely to be amplified or de-amplified by gravitational lensing due to matter distributions along the line-of-sight. A gravitationally lensed SN would appear brighter or fainter than the…
Gravitational lensing is brightening of background objects due to deflection of light by foreground sources. Rich clusters of galaxies are very effective lenses because they are centrally concentrated. Such natural Gravitational Telescopes…
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…
We review observations and gravitational lensing theory related to the magnification of background QSOs by intervening overdensities, and the induced cross-correlation between sources and foreground galaxies. We pay special attention to…
Strong lensing is a powerful tool to address three major astrophysical issues: understanding the spatial distribution of mass at kpc and sub-kpc scale, where baryons and dark matter interact to shape galaxies as we see them; determining the…
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…
For a given source and lens pair, there is a thin on-axis tube-like volume behind the lens in which the radiation flux from the source is greatly increased due to gravitational lensing. Any objects (such as dust grains) which pass through…
Superdense massive galaxies (r_e~1 kpc; M~10^{11} Msun) were common in the early universe (z>1.5). Within some hierarchical merging scenarios, a non-negligible fraction (1-10%) of these galaxies is expected to survive since that epoch…
We propose a novel concept of astrophysical mirroring in the schwarzschild framework, which emerges as a direct consequence of gravitational lensing effects occurring in the immediate vicinity of extremely dense massive objects within…
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 density of stars and MACHOs in the universe could theoretically be determined or limited by simultaneous measurements of compact sources by well separated observers. A gravitational lens effect would be expected to create a slight…
Since the first observation of triple-lens gravitational microlensing in 2006, analyses of six more events have been published by the end of 2018. In three events the lens was a star with two planets; four involved a binary star with a…
We discuss a possible method for detection of dark companions of galactic objects of stellar mass. Such binary systems are likely to occur in the galactic disk and possibly also in the halo. The high incidence of binary and…
Searches for planets via gravitational lensing have focused on cases in which the projected separation, a, between planet and star is comparable to the Einstein radius, R_E. This paper considers smaller orbital separations and demonstrates…
Studies of gravitational microlensing effects require the estimation of their detection efficiency as soon as one wants to quantify the massive compact objects along the line of sight of source targets. This is particularly important for…
We search for gravitational wave (GW) events from LIGO-Virgo's third run that may have been affected by gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing delays the arrival of GWs, and alters their amplitude -- thus biasing the inferred…
We model the strong lensing effect in the galaxy cluster PSZ1 G311.65-18.48 (z=0.443) with an improved version of the hybrid method WSLAP+. We extend the number of constraints by including the position of critical points, which are combined…
Given the number of recently discovered galaxy-galaxy lens systems, we anticipate that a gravitationally lensed supernova will be observed within the next few years. We explore the possibility that stars in the lens galaxy will produce…