Related papers: Caustic crossings in giant arcs with extended dark…
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…
In the near future, wide field surveys will discover 1000's of new strongly lensed quasars, and these will be monitored with unprecedented cadence by the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Many of these will undergo caustic-crossing…
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…
The possibility that stellar mass primordial black holes may make up at least a significant fraction of dark matter has recently received much attention, partly as a result of gravitational wave observations, but more specifically from…
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…
Highly magnified stars residing in caustic crossing lensed galaxies at z ~ 0.7-1.5 in galaxy cluster lensing fields inevitably exhibit recurrent brightening events as they traverse a micro caustic network cast down by foreground…
Numerical simulations and theoretical studies of the gravitational microlensing effect of a population of small bodies distributed along the line of sight to a compact light source such as a quasar indicate that caustic crossing effects…
We use the statistics of caustic crossings induced by microlensing in the lens system Q~2237+0305 to study the lens galaxy peculiar velocity. We calculate the caustic crossing rates for a comprehensive family of stellar mass functions and…
Though the bulk of the observed optical flux from the discs of intermediate-redshift lensed quasars is formed well outside the region of strong relativistic boosting and light-bending, relativistic effects have important influence on…
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…
Among all galactic microlensing events, those involving a passage of the observed source star over the caustic created by a binary lens are particularly useful in providing information about stellar atmospheres, the dynamics of stellar…
Cosmological observations precisely measure primordial variations in the density of the Universe at megaparsec and larger scales, but much smaller scales remain poorly constrained. However, sufficiently large initial perturbations at small…
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…
The only microlensing events towards the Magellanic Clouds for which the location of the lens is strongly constrained are the two binary caustic crossing events. In at least one and possibly both cases, the lens lies at, or close to, the…
First, we review the current status of the detection of strong `external' variability in the CLASS gravitational B1600+434, focusing on the 1998 VLA 8.5-GHz and 1998/9 WSRT multi-frequency observations. We show that this data can best be…
Quasar microlensing can be used to constrain important astrophysical properties, such as the accretion disk size and the amount of stars in the lensing galaxy. The associated brightness variations over time, in particular high magnification…
In a line caustic crossing microlensing event, the caustic line moving across the surface of the source star provides a direct method to measure the integrated luminosity profile of the star. Combined with the enormous brightening at the…
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 present a method to analyze binary-lens microlensing light curves with one well-sampled fold caustic crossing. In general, the surface of chi^2 shows extremely complicated behavior over the 9-parameter space that characterizes binary…
Observations of caustic-crossing galaxies at redshift $0.7<z<1$ show a wealth of transient events. Most of them are believed to be microlensing events of highly magnified stars. Earlier work predicted such events should be common near the…