Related papers: Microlensing masses via photon bunching
A high optical depth to gravitational microlensing towards the galactic bulge is consistent with current models of the galactic bar. The low optical depth towards the LMC can probably be accounted for by the ordinary stars in our galaxy and…
We propose a novel means of directly measuring cosmological distances using scintillated microlensing of fast radio bursts (FRBs). In standard strong lensing measurements of cosmic expansion, the main source of systematic uncertainty lies…
We report the analysis of microlensing event OGLE-2017-BLG-1038, observed by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, Korean Microlensing Telescope Network, and Spitzer telescopes. The event is caused by a giant source star in the…
We combine the available astrometric and photometric data for the 1993 microlensing event MACHO-LMC-5 to measure the mass of the lens, M=0.097 +/- 0.016 Msun. This is the most precise direct mass measurement of a single star other than the…
The initial results of microlensing surveys toward the Galactic bulge and the LMC are puzzling. Toward the LMC, the total mass in MACHOs is of order half that required to explain the dark matter, but the estimated MACHO mass (~0.4 Msun) is…
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…
Gravitational microlensing is a unique probe of the stellar content in strong lens galaxies. Flux ratio anomalies from gravitationally lensed supernovae (glSNe), just like lensed quasars, can be used to constrain the stellar mass fractions…
The detection of microlensing events from stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud and in the Galactic bulge raise important constraints on the distribution of dark matter and on galactic structure, although some events may be due to a new type…
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…
Microlensing is one of the most promising tools for discovering stellar-mass black holes (BHs) in the Milky Way because it allows us to probe dark or faint celestial compact objects. While the existence of stellar-mass BHs has been…
Simulations of planetary microlensing at high magnification that were carried out on a cluster computer are presented. It was found that the perturbations due to two-thirds of all planets occur in the time interval [-0.5t_FWHM, 0.5t_ FWHM]…
The Hubble constant value is currently known to 10% accuracy unless assumptions are made for the cosmology (Sandage et al. 2006). Gravitational lens systems provide another probe of the Hubble constant using time delay measurements.…
Follow the big stars! I review the theory of detection and parameter measurement of planetary systems by follow-up observations of ongoing microlensing events. Two parameters can generically be measured from the event itself: the…
If at cosmological distances, a small fraction of gamma-ray bursts should be multiply imaged by intervening galaxies or clusters, resulting in the appearance of two very similar bursts from the same location with a relative time delay of…
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…
We study microlensing of the faint images that form close to the centers of strong gravitational lens galaxies. These central images, which have finally begun to yield to observations, naturally appear in dense stellar fields and may be…
The mass function (MF) of isolated objects measured by microlensing consists of both a stellar and a planetary component. We compare the microlensing MFs of Gould et al (2022) and Sumi et al (2023) to other measurements of the MF. The…
Galaxy-cluster gravitational lenses can magnify background galaxies by a total factor of up to ~50. Here we report an image of an individual star at redshift z=1.49 (dubbed "MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1 (LS1)") magnified by >2000. A separate…
We test the impact of some systematic errors in weak lensing magnification measurements with the COSMOS 30-band photo-$z$ Survey flux limited to $I_{auto}<25.0$ using correlations of both source galaxy counts and magnitudes. Systematic…
Identifying galaxy clusters through overdensities of galaxies in photometric surveys is the oldest and arguably the most economic and mass-sensitive detection method, compared to X-ray and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect surveys that detect the…