Related papers: A Quasar Microlensing Light Curve Generator for LS…
We show how observations of multiply-imaged quasars at high redshift can be used as a probe of dark matter clumps (subhalos with masses ~ 10^9 solar masses) within the virialized extent of more massive lensing halos. A large abundance of…
Strongly lensed quadruply imaged quasars (quads) are extraordinary objects. They are very rare in the sky -- only a few tens are known to date -- and yet they provide unique information about a wide range of topics, including the expansion…
Gravitational lensing provides a means to measure mass that does not rely on detecting and analysing light from the lens itself. Compact objects are ideal gravitational lenses, because they have relatively large masses and are dim. In this…
Multiply-imaged quasars and AGNs observed in the mid-infrared (MIR) range are commonly assumed to be unaffected by the microlensing produced by the stars in their lensing galaxy. In this paper, we investigate the validity domain of this…
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…
The gravitational fields of astrophysical bodies bend the light around them, creating multiple paths along which light from a distant source can arrive at Earth. Measuring the difference in photon arrival time along these different paths…
In the era of synoptic surveys, the number of known gravitationally lensed quasars is set to increase by over an order of magnitude. These new discoveries will enable a move from single-quasar studies to investigations of statistical…
A fast and practical method is described for calculating the microlensed flux variance of an arbitrary source by uncorrelated stars. The required inputs are the mean convergence and shear due to the smoothed potential of the lensing galaxy,…
Recently, Heyrovsk\'y & Sasselov (1999) investigated the sensitivity of {\it single-lens} gravitational microlensing event light curves to small spots and found that during source transit events spots can cause deviations in amplification…
Galactic sized gravitational lenses are simulated by combining a cosmological N-body simulation and models for the baryonic component of the galaxy. The lens caustics, critical curves, image locations and magnification ratios are calculated…
Gravitational microlensing events of high magnification provide exceptional sensitivity to the presence of low-mass planets orbiting the lens star, including planets with masses as low as that of Earth. The essential requirement for the…
Gravitational lens systems containing lensed quasars are important as cosmological probes, as diagnostics of structural properties of the lensing galaxies and as tools to study the quasars themselves. The largest lensed quasar sample is the…
Over the last decade, quasar sample sizes have increased from several thousand to several hundred thousand, thanks mostly to SDSS imaging and spectroscopic surveys. LSST, the next-generation optical imaging survey, will provide hundreds of…
We study how joint shear and magnification measurements improve the statistical precision of weak lensing mass calibration experiments, relative to standard shear-only analysis. For our magnification measurements, we consider not only the…
Observations of the effect of microlensing in gravitationally lensed quasars can be used to study the structure of active galactic nuclei on distance scales down to the sizes of the supermassive black holes powering source activity. We…
The microlensing monitoring programs have studied large numbers of standard light curves which seem to be due to lensing by a dark point mass. Theory predicts that many microlensing events should display significant deviations from the…
When a gravitationally lensed source crosses a caustic, a pair of images is created or destroyed. We calculate the mean number of such pairs of micro-images $<n>$ for a given macro-image of a gravitationally lensed point source, due to…
When an image of a strongly lensed quasar is microlensed, the different components of its spectrum are expected to be differentially magnified owing to the different sizes of the corresponding emitting region. Chromatic changes are expected…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will provide for unbiased sampling of variability properties of objects with $r$ mag $<$ 24. This should allow for those objects whose variations reveal their orbital periods ($P_{orb}$), such as…
We report the first results of our systematic search for strongly lensed quasars using the spectroscopically confirmed quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Among 46,420 quasars from the SDSS Data Release 3 (~4188 deg^2), we…