Related papers: Simulating quasar microlensing light curves: High …
The fraction of quasar's and gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglows that vary due to microlensing by the stellar populations of intervening elliptical/S0 galaxies is computed by combining the joint distribution of effective microlensing…
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…
Gravitational lensing can amplify the apparent brightness of distant sources. Images that are highly magnified are often part of multiply-imaged systems, but we consider the possibility of having large magnifications without additional…
Geometrical optics provides an excellent description for quasar images crossing caustics which are formed by gravitational microlensing of objects like Q2237+0305. Within this approximation the source size can be estimated from the maximum…
Individual stars located near the caustics of galaxy clusters can undergo extreme magnification when crossing micro-caustics, rendering them observable even at cosmological distances. Though most massive stars are likely reside in binary…
Proceeding of the "HACK100" Conference, 6-10 June 2022, Trieste, Italy - In recent years, quasars have been shown to be reliable standardizable candles, thanks to the non-linear relation between their X-rays and ultraviolet luminosity.…
Four of nine exoplanets found by microlensing were detected by the resonant caustic, which represents the merging of the planetary and central caustics at the position when the projected separation of a host star and a bounded planet is…
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…
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…
A small fraction of all quasars are strongly lensed and multiply imaged, with usually a galaxy acting as the main lens. Some, maybe all of these quasars are also affected by microlensing, the effects of stellar mass objects in the lensing…
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…
Quasar microlensing offers a unique opportunity to resolve tiny sources in distant active galactic nuclei and study compact object populations in lensing galaxies. We therefore searched for microlensing-induced variability of the…
We investigate the weak lensing effects of line-of-sight structures on quadruple images in quasar-galaxy strong lens systems based on N-body and ray-tracing simulations that can resolve halos with a mass of 10^5 solar mass. The intervening…
Quasar microlensing effects make it possible to measure the accretion disc sizes around distant supermassive black holes that are still well beyond the spatial resolution of contemporary instrumentation. The sizes measured with this…
The most highly accreting quasars (xA) are of special interest in studies of the physics of AGNs and host galaxy evolution. Quasars accreting at high rates (L/LEdd $\sim$ 1) hold promise for use as 'standard candles': distance indicators…
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…
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…
Recent discussion of the effects of finite source size on high magnification microlensing events due to MACHOs motivates a study into the feasibility of observing such effects and extracting the source radius. Simulated observations are…
We present the lightcurves of 21 gravitational microlensing events from the first six years of the MACHO Project gravitational microlensing survey which are likely examples of lensing by binary systems. These events were manually selected…
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…