Related papers: Limits on Dark Matter Compact Objects implied by S…
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…
Microlensing of stars places significant constraints on sub-planetary-mass compact objects, including primordial black holes, as dark matter candidates. As the lens' Einstein radius in the source plane becomes comparable to the size of the…
Extreme magnifications of distant objects by factors of several thousand have recently become a reality. Small very luminous compact objects, such as supernovae (SNe), giant stars at z=1-2, Pop III stars at z>7 and even gravitational waves…
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…
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…
The idea that dark matter can be made of intermediate-mass primordial black holes in the $10M_\odot \lesssim M \lesssim 200M_\odot$ range has recently been reconsidered, particularly in the light of the detection of gravitational waves by…
Some of the first stars could be cooler and more massive than standard stellar models would suggest, due to the effects of dark matter annihilation in their cores. It has recently been argued that such objects may attain masses 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…
The nature of dark matter (DM) remains unknown despite very precise knowledge of its abundance in the universe. An alternative to new elementary particles postulates DM as made of macroscopic compact halo objects (MACHO) such as black holes…
The effect of stars on the lensing properties of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center is similar to the effect of planets on microlensing by a star. We show that the dense stellar cluster around SgrA* increases by factors of a…
Galaxy clusters magnify background objects through strong gravitational lensing. Typical magnifications for lensed galaxies are factors of a few but can also be as high as tens or hundreds, stretching galaxies into giant arcs. Individual…
The aim of this paper is to investigate the claim that stars in the lensing galaxy of a gravitationally lensed quasar system can always account for the observed microlensing of the individual quasar images. A small sample of gravitationally…
Luminous stars in background galaxies straddling the lensing caustic of a foreground galaxy cluster can be individually detected due to extreme magnification factors of $\sim 10^2$--$10^3$, as recently observed in deep HST images. We…
Galaxy-cluster gravitational lenses can magnify background galaxies by a total factor of up to ~50. Here we report an image of an individual star at redshift z=1.49 (dubbed "MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1 (LS1)") magnified by >2000. A separate…
Dark matter in the Universe consisting of macroscopic objects such as primordial black holes may cause gravitational lensing of distant objects. The magnification associated with lensing will lead to additional scatter in the received flux…
Many gravitationally lensed quasars exhibit flux ratio "anomalies" that cannot be explained under the hypothesis that the lensing potential is smooth on scales smaller than one kpc. Micro-lensing by stars is a natural source of granularity…
The aim of this paper is to present the case that stellar mass primordial black holes make up the dark matter component of the Universe. A near critical density of compact bodies implies that most lines of sight will be gravitationally…
If the dark halo of our galaxy is made of compact objects as massive as M = 10^6 solar masses, their detection by means of ordinary microlensing searches would take a very long time as the characteristic time scale of such a lensing event,…
We identify the largest known lensed images of a single spiral galaxy, lying close to the centre of the distant cluster MACS J1149.5+2223 ($z=0.544$). These images cover a total area of $\simeq 150 \Box\arcsec$ and are magnified $\simeq…
Gravitational microlensing is a robust tool to detect and directly measure the abundance and mass of any kind of compact objects, either in our galaxy or in the extragalatic domain. On basis to generic, broadly applicable arguments, it is…