Related papers: A Quasar Microlensing Light Curve Generator for LS…
As the number of detected gravitational wave sources increase with increasing sensitivity of the gravitational wave observatories, observing strongly lensed pair of events will become a real possibility. Lensed GW events will have very…
Strong gravitational lensed quasars (QSOs) have emerged as powerful and novel cosmic probes as they can deliver crucial cosmological information, such as a measurement of the Hubble constant, independent of other probes. Although the…
Cadenced optical imaging surveys in the next decade will be capable of detecting time-varying galaxy-scale strong gravitational lenses in large numbers, increasing the size of the statistically well-defined samples of multiply-imaged…
We present the results of the first long-term (2.2 years) spectroscopic monitoring of a gravitationally lensed quasar, namely the Einstein Cross Q2237+0305. We spatially deconvolve deep VLT/FORS1 spectra to accurately separate the spectrum…
Massive structures, such as galaxies, act as strong gravitational lenses on background sources. When the background source is a quasar, several lensed images are seen, as magnified or de-magnified versions of the same object. The detailed…
Quasars are bright and unobscured active galactic nuclei (AGN) thought to be powered by the accretion of matter around supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. The temporal variability of a quasar's brightness contains valuable…
We introduce a new scheme to study the nature of the central engine in a lensed QSO. The compact emission regions could have different sizes in different optical wavelengths, and our framework permits to obtain the source size ratios when a…
Lensed quasars and supernovae can be used to study galaxies' gravitational potential and measure cosmological parameters. The typical image separation of objects lensed by galaxies is of the order of 0.5". Therefore, finding the ones with…
Extended source effects can be seen in gravitational lensing events when sources cross critical lines. Those events probe the stellar intensity profile and could be used to measure limb darkening coefficients to test stellar model…
Spectroscopic surveys of massive galaxy clusters reveal the properties of faint background galaxies, thanks to the magnification provided by strong gravitational lensing. We present a systematic analysis of integral-field-spectroscopy…
One possibility for detecting low-amplitude pulsational variations is through gravitational microlensing. During a microlensing event, the temporary brightness increase leads to improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio, and thereby better…
Microlensing events provide a unique way to detect and measure the masses of isolated, non-luminous objects, particularly dark stellar remnants. Under certain conditions, it is possible to measure the mass of these objects using photometry…
We use the statistics of caustic crossings induced by microlensing in the lens system Q~2237+0305 to study the lens galaxy peculiar velocity. We calculate the caustic crossing rates for a comprehensive family of stellar mass functions and…
Cosmological gravitational microlensing is a useful technique for understanding the structure of the inner parts of a quasar, especially the accretion disk and the central supermassive black hole. So far, most of the cosmological…
We present four new seasons of optical monitoring data and six epochs of X-ray photometry for the doubly-imaged lensed quasar Q J0158-4325. The high-amplitude, short-period microlensing variability for which this system is known has…
The statistics of large-separation gravitational lensing are a powerful tool to probe mass distributions on the scale of galaxy clusters. In this paper we refine the analysis of our survey for large-separation (>5'') lensed FIRST quasars…
We propose and discuss a new experimental approach to measure the centroid shift induced by gravitational microlensing in the images of lensed quasars (astrometric microlensing). Our strategy is based on taking the photocenter of a region…
Observed magnitudes of many quasars with redshifts exceeding $z=5$ correspond to luminosities $L_{\rm bol} > 10^{14}\,L_\odot$. The standard mechanism of quasar energy release by accretion suggests that masses of superluminous quasars…
Strong lensing gravitational time delays are a powerful and cost effective probe of dark energy. Recent studies have shown that a single lens can provide a distance measurement with 6-7 % accuracy (including random and systematic…
We aim to use signatures of microlensing induced by stars in the foreground lens galaxy to infer the size of the accretion disk in the gravitationally lensed quasar Q 0957+561. The long-term photometric monitoring of this system (which so…