Related papers: Self-Lensing in Eclipsing X-ray Binary Systems
We investigate directly imaging exoplanets around eclipsing binaries, using the eclipse as a natural tool for dimming the binary and thus increasing the planet to star brightness contrast. At eclipse, the binary becomes point-like, making…
The mass function and statistics of binaries provide important diagnostics of the star formation process. Despite this importance, the mass function at low masses remains poorly known due to observational difficulties caused by the…
High-mass X-ray binaries are fundamental in the study of stellar evolution, nucleosynthesis, structure and evolution of galaxies and accretion processes. Hard X-rays observations by INTEGRAL and Swift have broad- ened significantly our…
Yes! Upcoming galaxy shear surveys have the potential to significantly improve our understanding of dark energy and neutrino mass if lensing systematics can be sufficiently controlled. The cross-correlations between the weak lensing shear,…
The dynamics of coalescing compact binaries can be affected by the environment in which the systems evolve, leaving detectable signatures into the emitted gravitational signal. In this paper we investigate the ability of gravitational-wave…
Microlensing and occultation are generally studied in the geometric optics limit. However, diffraction may be important when recently discovered Kuiper-Belt objects (KBOs) occult distant stars. In particular the effects of diffraction…
With several detections, the technique of gravitational microlensing has proven useful for studying planets that orbit stars at Galactic distances, and it can even be applied to detect planets in neighbouring galaxies. So far, planet…
The current gravitational-wave localization methods rely mainly on sources with electromagnetic counterparts. Unfortunately, a binary black hole does not emit light. Due to this, it is generally not possible to localize these objects…
Large scale imaging surveys will increase the number of galaxy-scale strong lensing candidates by maybe three orders of magnitudes beyond the number known today. Finding these rare objects will require picking them out of at least tens of…
We propose a novel concept of astrophysical mirroring in the schwarzschild framework, which emerges as a direct consequence of gravitational lensing effects occurring in the immediate vicinity of extremely dense massive objects within…
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 a powerful tool for quantifying the mass content and distribution in distant galaxies. By using milliarcsecond angular resolution observations of radio-loud gravitationally lensed sources it is also possible to…
We test the predictions of Emergent Gravity using matter densities of relaxed, massive clusters of galaxies using observations from optical and X-ray wavebands. We improve upon previous work in this area by including the baryon mass…
We describe here the nature, formation and evolution of the supergiant high mass X-ray binary (HMXB) population, i.e. systems accreting the stellar wind of supergiant stars. There are now many new observations, from the high-energy side…
Binary supermassive black hole (SMBH) systems result from galaxy mergers, and will eventually coalesce due to gravitational wave (GW) emission if the binary separation can be reduced to $\lesssim 0.1$ pc by other mechanisms. Here, we…
Strong gravitational lenses provide unique laboratories for cosmological and astrophysical investigations, but they must first be discovered - a task that can be met with significant contamination by other astrophysical objects and…
The recent detection of gravitational waves indicates that stellar-mass black hole binaries are likely to be a key population of sources for forthcoming observations. With future upgrades, ground-based detectors could detect merging black…
Gravitational microlensing by the stellar population of lensing galaxies provides an important opportunity to spatially resolve the accretion disk structure in strongly lensed quasars. Some of the objects (like Einstein's cross) are…
Weak gravitational lensing is one of the key probes of cosmology. Cosmic shear surveys aimed at measuring the distribution of matter in the universe are currently being carried out (Pan-STARRS) or planned for the coming decade (DES, LSST,…
The gravitational microlensing as a unique astrophysical tool can be used for studying the atmosphere of stars thousands of parsec far from us. This capability results from the bending of light rays in the gravitational field of a lens…