Related papers: Confirmation of Planet-Mass Objects in Extragalact…
This is the first in a series of papers in which we measure accurate weak-lensing masses for 51 of the most X-ray luminous galaxy clusters known at redshifts 0.15<z<0.7, in order to calibrate X-ray and other mass proxies for cosmological…
(ABRIDGED) Aims: We discuss and characterize micro-lensing among the 3 brightest lensed images (A-B-C) of the gravitational lens system RXS J1131-1231 (a quadruply imaged AGN) by means of long slit optical and NIR spectroscopy. Qualitative…
Dark matter could comprise, at least in part, primordial black holes (PBH). To test this hypothesis, we present an approach to constrain the PBH mass ($M_{\rm{PBH}}$) and mass fraction ($f_{\rm{PBH}}$) from the flux ratios of quadruply…
Motivated by debris disk studies, we investigate the gravitational microlensing of background starlight by a planetesimal disk around a foreground star. We use dynamical survival models to construct a plausible example of a planetesimal…
With their excellent photometric precision and dramatic increase in monitoring frequency, future microlensing survey experiments are expected to be sensitive to very short time-scale, isolated events caused by free-floating and…
We use weak-lensing shear measurements to determine the mean mass of optically selected galaxy clusters in Dark Energy Survey Science Verification data. In a blinded analysis, we split the sample of more than 8,000 redMaPPer clusters into…
We present weak lensing mass estimates of seven shear-selected galaxy cluster candidates from the Deep Lens Survey. The clusters were previously identified as mass peaks in convergence maps of 8.6 sq. deg of R band imaging, and followed up…
We detect the weak gravitational lensing distortion of 450,000 background galaxies (20<R<23) by 790 foreground galaxies (R<18) selected from the Las Campanas Redshift Survey (LCRS). This is the first detection of weak lensing by field…
A space-based gravitational microlensing exoplanet survey will provide a statistical census of exoplanets with masses greater than 0.1 Earth-masses and orbital separations ranging from 0.5AU to infinity. This includes analogs to all the…
Observations of high-redshift quasars frequently promote suggestions of large black hole masses, whose presence so early in cosmic time is not easily explicable. I consider the parallel with ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) -- now known…
We introduce a new method for constraining the redshift distribution of a set of galaxies, using weak gravitational lensing shear. Instead of using observed shears and redshifts to constrain cosmological parameters, we ask how well the…
We present the weak lensing mass calibration of the stellar mass based $\mu_{\star}$ mass proxy for redMaPPer galaxy clusters in the Dark Energy Survey Year 1. For the first time we are able to perform a calibration of $\mu_{\star}$ at high…
We report the detection of an extrasolar planet of mass ratio q ~ 2 x 10^(-4) in microlensing event MOA-2007-BLG-192. The best fit microlensing model shows both the microlensing parallax and finite source effects, and these can be combined…
[abridged] WFIRST is uniquely capable of finding planets with masses as small as Mars at separations comparable to Jupiter, i.e., beyond the current ice lines of their stars. These planets fall between the close-in planets found by Kepler…
We analyze V, I and H band HST images and two seasons of R-band monitoring data for the gravitationally lensed quasar SDSS0924+0219. We clearly see that image D is a point-source image of the quasar at the center of its host galaxy. We can…
With planets orbiting stars, a planetary mass function should not be seen as a low-mass extension of the stellar mass function, but a proper formalism needs to take care of the fact that the statistical properties of planet populations are…
Microlensing is a powerful technique to study the Galactic population of "dark" objects such as exoplanets both bound and unbound, brown dwarfs, low-luminosity stars, old white dwarfs, neutron stars, and almost the only way to study…
The recent discovery of gravitational waves from mergers of $\sim 10 \, M_{\odot}$ black hole binaries has stimulated interested in Primordial Black Hole dark matter in this mass range. Microlensing and dynamical constraints exclude all of…
(abridged) Aims: RXS J113155.4-123155 (z=0.66) is a quadruply imaged lensed quasar with a resolved Einstein Ring. The goal of this paper is to provide a full characterization of this system, and more particularly accurate astrometry and…
We describe the results and outline the methods used in a search for microlensing events affecting stars in the outer bulge and inner disk of M31, due both to masses in M31 and the Galaxy. These observations, from 1994 and 1995 on the…