Related papers: Microlensing near macro-caustics
Microlensing is increasingly gaining recognition as a powerful method for the detection and characterization of extra-solar planetary systems. Naively, one might expect that the probability of detecting the influence of more than one planet…
The simple physics of microlensing provides a well-understood tool with which to probe the atmospheres of distant stars in the Galaxy and Local Group with high magnification and resolution. Recent results in measuring stellar surface…
Motivated by debris disk studies, we investigate the gravitational microlensing of background starlight by a planetesimal disk around a foreground star. We use dynamical survival models to construct a plausible example of a planetesimal…
The properties of substructure in galaxy clusters, exquisitely probed by gravitational lensing, offer a stringent test of dark matter (DM) models. Combining strong- and weak-lensing data for massive clusters, we map their total mass --…
A long-standing problem of strong lensing by galaxy clusters regards the observed high rate of giant gravitational arcs as compared to the predictions in the framework of the "standard" cosmological model. Recently, few other…
We discuss a method to build up and study a sample of distant galaxies, with 2<z<5, using the gravitational amplification effect in cluster-lenses for which the mass distribution is well known. The candidates are selected close to the…
Cosmological cluster-scale strong gravitational lensing probes the mass distribution of the dense cores of massive dark matter halos and the structures along the line of sight from background sources to the observer. It is frequently…
The main aim of microlensing experiments is to evaluate the mean mass of massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) and the mass fraction of the Galactic halo made by this type of dark matter. Statistical analysis shows that by considering a…
Although some of the properties of the caustics in planetary microlensing have been known, our understanding of them is mostly from scattered information based on numerical approaches. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive and analytic…
Giant stellar clumps are ubiquitous in high-redshift galaxies. They are thought to play an important role in the build-up of galactic bulges and as diagnostics of star formation feedback in galactic discs. Hubble Space Telescope (HST) blank…
We present a new lens model for the $z=0.396$ galaxy cluster MACS J0416.1$-$2403 based on a previously known set of 77 spectroscopically confirmed, multiply imaged galaxies plus an additional set of 42 candidate multiply imaged galaxies…
Nearby masses can have a high probability of lensing stars in a distant background field. High-probability lensing, or mesolensing, can therefore be used to dramatically increase our knowledge of dark and dim objects in the solar…
We attempt to determine whether the MACHO microlensing source stars are drawn from the average population of the LMC or from a population behind the LMC by examining the HST color-magnitude diagram (CMD) of microlensing source stars. We…
It has been shown by Paczy\'nski that gravitational microlensing is potentially a useful method for detecting the dark constituents of the halo of our galaxy, if their mass lies in the approximate domain $10^{-6}<M/M_\odot<10^{-1}$.…
To date, the study of high-magnification gravitational lensing effects of galaxy clusters has focused upon the grossly distorted, luminous arc-like features formed in massive, centrally condensed clusters. We investigate the formation of a…
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 combination of galaxy-galaxy lensing and galaxy clustering data has the potential to simultaneously constrain both the cosmological and galaxy formation models. In this paper we perform a comprehensive exploration of these signals and…
When an image of a strongly lensed quasar is microlensed, the different components of its spectrum are expected to be differentially magnified owing to the different sizes of the corresponding emitting region. Chromatic changes are expected…
A synopsis of the recent results from our study of galaxy-galaxy lensing in clusters is presented. We have applied our analysis techniques to the sample of HST cluster-lenses that span a redshift range from redshift 0.18 to 0.58. We find…
We consider microlensing of an elliptical source crossing a fold caustic. We derive a simple expression for the light curve of a source with uniform surface brightness that is accurate to third order in the ellipticity e (yielding errors of…