Related papers: Transparent Spheres as Gravitational Lens
The multiple images of lensed quasars provide evidence on the mass distribution of the lensing galaxy. The lensing invariants are constructed from the positions of the images, their parities and their fluxes. They depend only on the…
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…
Resolved rotation curves (RCs) are the gold-standard measurements for inferring dark matter distributions in $\Lambda$CDM and testing alternative theories of dynamics in galaxies. However they are expensive to obtain, making them…
Gravitational lensing refers to the deflection of light by the gravity of celestial bodies, often predominantly composed of dark matter. Seen through a gravitational lens, the images of distant galaxies appear distorted. In this paper we…
Numerical studies on the imaging and caustic properties of the singular isothermal sphere (SIS) under a wide range of external shear (from 0.0 to 2.0) are presented. Using a direct inverse-mapping formula for this lens system (Lee 2003), we…
We present lenscat, a public and community-contributed catalog of strong gravitational lenses found by electromagnetic surveys. The main objective of lenscat is to compile a simple, easy-to-access catalog that can be used in a variety of…
For a wide variety of cosmological models characterized by the cosmic mass density $\Omega_M$ and the normalized cosmological constant $\Omega_{\Lambda}$, we derive an analytic expression for the estimate of magnification cross-sections by…
Future high precision photometric measurements of transiting extrasolar planets promise to tell us much about the nature of these systems. We examine how atmospheric lensing and (projected) planet oblateness/ellipticity modify transit light…
In this series of papers we develop a formalism for constraining mass profiles in strong gravitational lenses with extended images, using fluxes in addition to positional information. We start in this paper with a circular power-law profile…
Gravitational waves (GWs) offer a new observational window into the universe, providing insights into compact objects and cosmic structures. Gravitational lensing, commonly studied in electromagnetic waves, also affects GWs, introducing…
Given any space-time $M$ without singularities and any event $O$, there is a natural continuous mapping $f$ of a two dimensional sphere into any space-like slice $T$ not containing $O$. The set of future null geodesics (or the set of past…
Large scale imaging surveys will increase the number of galaxy-scale strong lensing candidates by maybe three orders of magnitudes beyond the number known today. Finding these rare objects will require picking them out of at least tens of…
We report on an investigation of the environments of the SLACS sample of gravitational lenses. The local and global environments of the lenses are characterized using SDSS photometry and, when available, spectroscopy. We find that the lens…
The gravitational field of a galaxy can act as a lens and deflect the light emitted by a more distant object such as a quasar. Strong gravitational lensing causes multiple images of the same quasar to appear in the sky. Since the light in…
We study a class of gravitational lensing systems consisting of an inclined ring/belt, with and without an added point mass at the centre. We show that a common feature of such systems are so-called "pseudo-caustics", across which the…
Gravitational lensing by the dual cusp catastrophes of the cold dark matter (CDM) caustic rings at cosmological distances may provide the tantalizing opportunity to detect CDM indirectly, and discriminate between axions and weakly…
As GRBs trace the high-z Universe, there is a non-negligible probability of a lensing effect being imprinted on the lightcurves of the bursts. We propose to search for lensed candidates with a cross-correlation method, by looking at bursts…
Modern applications of strong gravitational lensing require the ability to use precise and varied observational data to constrain complex lens models. I discuss two sets of computational methods for lensing calculations. The first is a new…
We explore interstellar light transmission facilitated by gravitational lensing, focusing on axially-symmetric lensing configurations where the transmitter, lens, and receiver are nearly aligned. Positioning an optical transmitter in the…
We show that a cosmic standard ruler can be constructed from the joint measurement of the time delay (dt) between gravitationally lensed quasar images and the velocity dispersion (sigma^2) of the lensing galaxy. This is specifically shown,…