Related papers: New Approximation of Magnification Statistics for …
We study light variability of gravitationally magnified high-redshift star clusters induced by a foreground population of microlenses. This arises as the incoherent superposition of light variations from a large number of source stars…
Microlensing of stars in strongly lensed galaxies can lead to temporary extreme magnification factors ($\mu\!>\!1000$), enabling their detection at high redshifts. Following the discovery of Icarus, several stars at cosmological distances…
Studies of the inner regions of micro-lensed AGN during caustic crossing events have often relied upon the approximation that the magnification near a fold caustic is inversely proportional to the square root of the source-caustic distance.…
In Paper I we studied the theory of gravitational microlensing for a planar distribution of point masses. In this second paper, we extend the analysis to a three-dimensional lens distribution. First we study the lensing properties of…
We present a rigorous, detailed study of the generic, quantitative properties of gravitational microlensing near cusp catastrophes. We derive explicit formulas for the total magnification and centroid of the images created for sources…
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,…
Microlensing near macro-caustics is a complex phenomenon in which swarms of micro-images produced by micro-caustics form on both sides of a macro-critical curve. Recent discoveries of highly magnified images of individual stars in massive…
Recent observations of lensed galaxies at cosmological distances have detected individual stars that are extremely magnified when crossing the caustics of lensing clusters. In idealized cluster lenses with smooth mass distributions, two…
We have worked out simple analytical formulae that accurately approximate the relationship between the position of the source with respect to the lens center and the amplification of the images, hence the lens cross section, for realistic…
The statistics of gravitational arcs in galaxy clusters is a powerful probe of cluster structure and may provide complementary cosmological constraints. Despite recent progresses, discrepancies still remain among modelling and observations…
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…
We study microlensing of the faint images that form close to the centers of strong gravitational lens galaxies. These central images, which have finally begun to yield to observations, naturally appear in dense stellar fields and may be…
Recent discussion of the effects of finite source size on high magnification microlensing events due to MACHOs motivates a study into the feasibility of observing such effects and extracting the source radius. Simulated observations are…
We study the local behavior of gravitational lensing near fold catastrophes. Using a generic form for the lensing map near a fold, we determine the observable properties of the lensed images, focusing on the case when the individual images…
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…
We consider the effect of lensing magnification on high redshift sources in the case that magnification varies on the sky, as expected in wide fields of view or within observed galaxy clusters. We give expressions for number counts, flux…
We study the effects of strong lensing on the observed number counts of mm sources using a ray tracing simulation and two number count models of unlensed sources. We employ a quantitative treatment of maximum attainable magnification factor…
Gravitational lensing magnification modifies the observed spatial distribution of galaxies and can severely bias cosmological probes of large-scale structure if not accurately modelled. Standard approaches to modelling this magnification…
It is conventional to calculate the probability of microlensing for a cosmologically distant source based on the Press-Gunn approximation that the lensing objects are uniformly and randomly distributed in the intervening space with a…
Magnification changes the observed number counts of galaxies on the sky. This biases the observed tangential shear profiles around galaxies, the so-called galaxy-galaxy lensing (GGL) signal, and the related excess mass profile.…