Related papers: Gravitational microlensing by dark matter in exten…
The accretion of dark matter around the primordial black holes (PBHs) could lead to the formation of surrounding minihalos, whose mass can be several orders of magnitude higher than the central PBH mass. The gravitational microlensing…
OGLE and other projects are likely to discover first stellar mass black holes and the first planets through gravitational lensing in the next year or two. It is important to have follow-up projects ready, using diverse observing methods.…
The failure to find evidence for elementary particles that could serve as the constituents of dark matter brings to mind suggestions that dark matter might consist of massive compact objects (MACHOs). In particular, it has recently been…
We review progress in understanding dark matter by astrophysics, and particularly via the effect of gravitational lensing. Evidence from many different directions now all imply that five sixths of the material content of the universe is in…
Luminous tracers have been used extensively to map the large-scale matter distribution in the Universe. Similarly the dynamics of stars or galaxies can be used to estimate masses of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. However, assumptions…
We investigate the feasibility of extracting the gravitational nanolensing signal due to the presence of subsolar mass halos within galaxy-sized dark matter halos. We show that subsolar mass halos in a lensing galaxy can cause strong…
Dark matter structures within strong gravitational lens galaxies and along their line of sight leave a gravitational imprint on the multiple images of lensed sources. Strong gravitational lensing provides, therefore, a key test of different…
Cosmological observations precisely measure primordial variations in the density of the Universe at megaparsec and larger scales, but much smaller scales remain poorly constrained. However, sufficiently large initial perturbations at small…
The idea that dark matter can be made of intermediate-mass primordial black holes in the $10M_\odot \lesssim M \lesssim 200M_\odot$ range has recently been reconsidered, particularly in the light of the detection of gravitational waves by…
Ordinary baryonic particles (such as protons and neutrons) account for only one-sixth of the total matter in the Universe. The remainder is a mysterious "dark matter" component, which does not interact via the electromagnetic force and thus…
Strong gravitational lensing has been identified as a promising astrophysical probe to study the particle nature of dark matter. In this paper we present a detailed study of the power spectrum of the projected mass density (convergence)…
Gravitational microlensing finds planets through their gravitational influence on the light coming from a more distant background star. The presence of the planet is then inferred from the tell-tale brightness variations of the background…
Gravitational lensing is one of a number of methods used to probe the distribution of dark mass in the Universe. On galactic scales, complementary techniques include the use of stellar kinematics, kinematics and morphology of the neutral…
Since the strength of weak gravitational lensing is proportional to the mass along the line of sight, it might be possible to use lensing data to find the masses of individual dark matter clusters. Unfortunately, the effect on the lensing…
Microlensing searches aim to detect compact halo dark matter via its gravitational lensing effect on stars within the Large Magellanic Cloud. The most recent results have led to the claim that roughly one fifth of the galactic halo dark…
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…
We investigate how strong gravitational lensing can test contemporary models of massive elliptical (ME) galaxy formation, by combining a traditional decomposition of their visible stellar distribution with a lensing analysis of their mass…
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…
We argue that gravitational microlensing is a feasible technique for measuring the mass function of brown dwarf stars in distant galaxies. Microlensing surveys of the bulge of M31, and of M87 in the Virgo cluster, may provide enough events…
Strong gravitational lensing of quasars has the potential to unlock the poorly understood physics of these fascinating objects, as well as serve as a probe of the lensing mass distribution and of cosmological parameters. In particular,…