Related papers: Gravitational microlensing by dark matter in exten…
We consider a contribution of microlensing to the X-ray variability of high-redshifted QSOs. Such an effect could be caused by stellar mass objects (SMO) located in a bulge or/and in a halo of this quasar as well as at cosmological…
A significant fraction of non-baryonic or baryonic dark matter in galactic halos may consist of MASsive Compact Objects (MASCOs) with mass M=10^{1-4}M_{sun}. Possible candidates for such compact objects include primordial black holes or…
Variability in gravitationally lensed quasars can be due to intrinsic fluctuations of the quasar or due to ``microlensing'' by compact objects along the line of sight. If disentangled from each other, microlens-induced variability can be…
Primordial black holes (PBHs) may form in the early stages of the Universe via the collapse of large density perturbations. Depending on the formation mechanism, PBHs may exist and populate today the galactic halos and have masses in a wide…
To set useful limits on the abundance of small-scale dark matter halos (subhalos) in a galaxy scale, we have carried out mid-infrared imaging and integral-field spectroscopy for a sample of quadruple lens systems showing anomalous flux…
If the Dark Matter consists of primordial black holes (PBHs), we show that gravitational lensing of stars being monitored by NASA's Kepler search for extra-solar planets can cause significant numbers of detectable microlensing events. A…
We demonstrate a new technique to search for dark compact objects. When dark matter comprising a dark compact object interacts with photons, the compact object can disperse light traveling though it. As these objects pass between Earth and…
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…
We present the distribution of luminous and dark matter in a set of strong lensing (early-type) galaxies. By combining two independent techniques - stellar population synthesis and gravitational lensing - we can compare the baryonic and…
Discovery of strongly-lensed gravitational wave (GW) sources will unveil binary compact objects at higher redshifts and lower intrinsic luminosities than is possible without lensing. Such systems will yield unprecedented constraints on the…
We give a non-exhaustive review of the use of strong gravitational lensing in placing constraints on the quantity of dark and visible mass in galaxies. We discuss development of the methodology and summarise some recent results.
The detection of a sub-solar mass black hole could yield dramatic new insights into the nature of dark matter and early-Universe physics, as such objects lack a traditional astrophysical formation mechanism. Gravitational waves allow for…
The study of extra-solar planetary systems has emerged as a new discipline of observational astronomy in the past few years with the discovery of a number of extra-solar planets. The properties of most of these extra-solar planets were not…
Weak gravitational lensing is a unique probe of the dark side of the universe: it provides a direct way to map the distribution of dark matter around galaxies, clusters of galaxies and on cosmological scales. Furthermore, the measurement of…
A fraction of light scalar dark matter, especially axions, may organize into Bose-Einstein condensates, gravitationally bound clumps, "boson stars", and be present in large number in galactic halos today. We compute the expected number of…
Most of the matter in the universe is not luminous and can be observed directly only through its gravitational effect. An emerging technique called weak gravitational lensing uses background galaxies to reveal the foreground dark matter…
A substantial part of the dark matter of the Universe could be in the form of compact objects (MACHOs), detectable through gravitational microlensing effects as they pass through the line of sight to background light sources. So far, most…
We calculate the abundance of dark-matter concentrations that are sufficiently overdense to produce a detectable weak-gravitational-lensing signal. Most of these overdensities are virialized halos containing identifiable X-ray and/or…
While primordial black holes (PBHs) have long been a benchmark target for microlensing searches, the modern landscape of dark matter models suggests other, distinct, formation channels for compact objects made of dark matter. In the large…
The aim of this paper is to investigate the claim that stars in the lensing galaxy of a gravitationally lensed quasar system can always account for the observed microlensing of the individual quasar images. A small sample of gravitationally…