Related papers: An Efficient Method for Simulating Light Curves of…
We present a tool to generate mock quasar microlensing light curves and sample them according to any observing strategy. An updated treatment of the fixed and random velocity components of observer, lens, and source is used, together with a…
In quasars which are lensed by galaxies, the point-like images sometimes show sharp and uncorrelated brightness variations (microlensing). These brightness changes are associated with the innermost region of the quasar passing through a…
Microlensing events are being discovered and alerted by the two survey teams OGLE and MOA at an increasing rate. Around ten percent of these events involve binary lenses. Such events potentially contain much information on the physical…
Microlensing is a powerful tool for studying stellar atmospheres because as the source crosses regions of formally infinite magnification (caustics) the surfaceof the star is resolved, thereby allowing one to measure the radial intensity…
We present a fast algorithm to produce light curves of distant stars undergoing microlensing near critical curves. The need of these type of algorithms is motivated by recent observations of microlensing events of distant stars at high…
The phenomenon of microlensing has successfully been used to detect extrasolar planets. By observing characteristic, rare deviations in the gravitational microlensing light curve one can discover that a lens is a star--planet system. In…
Many synoptic surveys are observing large parts of the sky multiple times. The resulting lightcurves provide a wonderful window to the dynamic nature of the universe. However, there are many significant challenges in analyzing these light…
We report the analysis of the first resolved caustic-crossing binary-source microlensing event OGLE-2016-BLG-1003. The event is densely covered by the round-the-clock observations of three surveys. The light curve is characterized by two…
Highly magnified stars ($\mu$ $>$ 100) are now outinely identified as transient events at cosmological distances thanks to microlensing by intra-cluster stars near the critical curves of galaxy clusters. Using the {\it James Webb} Space…
Cluster-scale strong lensing is a powerful tool for exploring the properties of dark matter and constraining cosmological models. However, due to the complex parameter space, pixelized strong lens modeling in galaxy clusters is…
We consider small-scale spheroidal clusters of weakly interacting massive particles in our Galaxy as non-compact gravitational microlenses and predict the appearance of caustics in the plane of a lensed source. The crossing of these…
We present the analysis of microlensing event MOA-2010-BLG-117, and show that the light curve can only be explained by the gravitational lensing of a binary source star system by a star with a Jupiter mass ratio planet. It was necessary to…
Gravitational microlensing of planetary-mass objects (or "nanolensing", as it has been termed) can be used to probe the distribution of mass in a galaxy that is acting as a gravitational lens. Microlensing and nanolensing light curve…
We propose a method that can determine the ellipticities of source stars of microlensing events produced by binary lenses. The method is based on the fact that the products of the caustic-crossing timescale, $\Delta t$, and the cosine of…
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…
Binary microlensing light curves have a variety of morphologies. Many are indistinguishable from point lens light curves. Of those that deviate from the point lens form, caustic crossing light curves have tended to dominate identified…
At present, microlensing light curves from different telescopes and filters are photometrically aligned by fitting them to a common model. We present a second method based on photometry of common field stars. If two spectral responses are…
Gravitational lensing is the deflection of light rays due to the gravity of intervening masses. This phenomenon is observed in a variety of scales and configurations, involving any non-uniform mass such as planets, stars, galaxies, clusters…
The contouring methods described by Lewis et al. (1993) and Witt (1993) are very efficient and elegant for obtaining the magnification of a point source moving along a straight track in the source plane. The method is, however, not very…
The method devised by Lewis et al. (1993) for calculating the light curve of a microlensed point source is expanded to two dimensions to enable the calculation of light curves of extended sources. This method is significantly faster than…