Related papers: Statistical Microlensing Toward Magnified High-Red…
A galaxy cluster acts as a cosmic telescope over background galaxies but also as a cosmic microscope of the lens imperfections. The diverging magnification of lensing caustics enhances the microlensing effect of substructure present within…
Gravitational lensing is the phenomenon arising when light rays are deflected by the mass between the source and the observer. Largely magnified and highly distorted images of background galaxies are formed by these angular deflections if…
We study the populations of stellar clumps in three high-redshift galaxies, at z=4.92, 4.88 and 4.03, gravitationally lensed by the foreground galaxy clusters MS1358, RCS0224 and MACS0940, respectively. The lensed galaxies consist of…
Massive stars at cosmological distances can be individually detected during transient microlensing events, when gravitational lensing magnifications may exceed ~1000. Nine such sources were identified in JWST NIRCam imaging of a single…
Individual stars located near the caustics of galaxy clusters can undergo extreme magnification when crossing micro-caustics, rendering them observable even at cosmological distances. Though most massive stars are likely reside in binary…
Effects of macro-and microlensing on the spatial and temporal characteristics of images of remote sources, observed through the inner regions of lensing galaxies are discussed. A particular attention was given to the case, when microlenses,…
Direct observations of the first generation of luminous objects will likely become feasible over the next decade. The advent of the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) will allow imaging of numerous galaxies and mini-quasars at redshifts…
A synopsis of the recent results from our study of galaxy-galaxy lensing in clusters is presented. We have applied our analysis techniques to the sample of HST cluster-lenses that span a redshift range from redshift 0.18 to 0.58. We find…
Strong gravitational magnifications enable to detect faint background sources, resolve their internal structures, and even identify individual stars in distant galaxies. Highly magnified individual stars allow various applications,…
This is the first in a series of papers on the weak lensing effect caused by clusters of galaxies in Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The photometrically selected cluster sample, known as MaxBCG, includes ~130,000 objects between redshift 0.1 and…
When gravitational waves pass through the nuclear star clusters of galactic lenses, they may be microlensed by the stars. Such microlensing can cause potentially observable beating patterns on the waveform due to waveform superposition and…
If stars at the lower end of the main sequence are responsible for the microlensing events observed in the Galactic bulge, then light from the lensing star contributes to the observed brightness. The background and lensing stars generally…
Cluster gravitational lensing surveys like the Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields survey will detect distant galaxies 10-50 times fainter than any yet discovered. Using these surveys to measure the luminosity function of such faint,…
Clusters of galaxies have a huge mass which can act as gravitational lenses. Galaxies behind clusters can be distorted to form arcs in images by the lenses. Herein a search was done for giant lensed arcs by galaxy clusters using the SDSS…
We present an extensive spectroscopic follow-up campaign of 29 strong lensing (SL) selected galaxy clusters discovered primarily in the Second Red-Sequence Cluster Survey (RCS-2). Our spectroscopic analysis yields redshifts for 52…
Gravitational microlensing surveys target very dense stellar fields in the local group. As a consequence the microlensed source stars are often blended with nearby unresolved stars. The presence of `blending' is a cause of major uncertainty…
Evolution in the mass function of galaxy clusters sensitively traces both the expansion history of the Universe and cosmological structure formation. Robust cluster mass determinations are a key ingredient for a reliable measurement of this…
We investigate the microlensing effects on a source star surrounded by a circumstellar disk, as a function of wavelength. The microlensing light curve of the system encodes the geometry and surface brightness profile of the disk. In the…
The recent discovery of fast transient events near critical curves of massive galaxy clusters, which are interpreted as highly magnified individual stars in giant arcs due to caustic crossing, opens up the possibility of using such…
We present a strong lensing system in which a double source is imaged 5 times by 2 early-type galaxies. We take advantage in this target of the multi-band photometry obtained as part of the CLASH program, complemented by the spectroscopic…