Related papers: Diffuse emission in microlensed quasars and its im…
Intensive monitoring campaigns have recently attempted to measure the time delays between multiple images of gravitational lenses. Some of the resulting light-curves show puzzling low-level, rapid variability which is unique to individual…
Lensed quasars are powerful cosmic laboratories; they are used to simultaneously probe various astrophysical phenomena. Microlensing by stars within distant galaxies acts as strong gravitational lenses of multiply imaged quasars, and…
We present a joint estimate of the stellar/dark matter mass fraction in lens galaxies and the average size of the accretion disk of lensed quasars from microlensing measurements of 27 quasar image pairs seen through 19 lens galaxies. The…
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…
Precise lens modeling is a critical step in time delay studies of multiply imaged quasars, which are key for measuring some important cosmological parameters (specially $H_0$). However, lens models (in particular those semi-automatically…
We introduce a deep machine learning approach to studying quasar microlensing light curves for the first time by analyzing hundreds of thousands of simulated light curves with respect to the accretion disc size and temperature profile. Our…
Time-delay cosmography in strongly lensed quasars offer an independent way of measuring the Hubble constant, $H_0$. However, it has been proposed that the combination of microlensing and source-size effects, also known as microlensing time…
X-ray and optical observations of quadruply lensed quasars can provide a microarcsecond probe of the lensed quasar, corresponding to scale sizes of \~10^2-10^4 gravitational radii of the central black hole. This high angular resolution is…
Microlensing observations indicate that quasar accretion discs have half-light radii larger than expected from standard theoretical predictions based on quasar fluxes or black hole masses. Blackburne and colleagues have also found a very…
Microlensing of multiply imaged quasars is a unique probe of quasar structure, down to the size of the accretion disc and the central black hole. Flux ratios between close pairs of images of lensed quasars can be used to constrain the…
We consider three corrections to the disk sizes estimated at a given frequency using accretion models. They are due to a color correction, a disk truncation at an inner radius larger than the innermost stable circular orbit, and disk winds,…
The optical-UV continuum of quasars is broadly consistent with the emission from a geometrically thin optically thick accretion disk (AD). The AD produces the ionizing continuum which powers the broad and narrow emission lines. The maximum…
We present 13 seasons of $R$-band photometry of the quadruply-lensed quasar WFI 2033-4723 from the 1.3m SMARTS telescope at CTIO and the 1.2m Euler Swiss Telescope at La Silla, in which we detect microlensing variability of $\sim0.2$ mags…
The well-known bluer-when-brighter trend observed in quasar variability is a signature of the complex processes in the accretion disk, and can be a probe of the quasar variability mechanism. Using a sample of 604 variable quasars with…
We present estimates for the size and the logarithmic slope of the disk temperature profile of the lensed quasar Q2237+0305, independent of the component velocities. These estimates are based on six epochs of multi-wavelength narrowband…
Two years' worth of u-, g-, r-, i-, and z-band optical light curves were obtained for the massive type 1 quasar PG 2308+098 at z=0.433 using the 1.05-m Kiso Schmidt telescope/Kiso Wide Field Camera, and inter-band time lags of the light…
Context. The gravitational lens system SDSS J1004+4112 was the first known example of a quasar lensed by a galaxy cluster. The interest in this system has been renewed following the publication of r-band light curves spanning 14.5 years and…
In this paper we show that to explain the observed distribution of amplitudes in a large sample of quasar lightcurves, a significant contribution from microlensing is required. This implies the existence of a cosmologically distributed…
We report on a program of spectroscopic observations of gravitationally-lensed QSOs with multiple images. We seek to establish whether microlensing is occurring in each QSO image using only single-epoch observations. We calculate flux…
Since the radiation from different portions in the central region of a quasar can be successively amplified during a microlensing event, microlensing light curves provide us with fruitful information regarding the emissivity distribution of…