Related papers: Caustic crossings in giant arcs with extended dark…
We study the gravitational lensing properties of a massive object in a dark matter halo, concentrating on the critical curves and caustics of the combined lens. We model the system in the simplest approximation by a point mass embedded in a…
Highly magnified stars ($\mu$ $>$ 100) are now outinely identified as transient events at cosmological distances thanks to microlensing by intra-cluster stars near the critical curves of galaxy clusters. Using the {\it James Webb} Space…
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…
We consider small-scale spheroidal clusters of weakly interacting massive particles in our Galaxy as non-compact gravitational microlenses and predict the appearance of caustics in the plane of a lensed source. The crossing of these…
The idea that dark matter in the form of small compact bodies (most plausibly planetary mass primordial black holes) betrays its presence by the microlensing of quasars, has been stimulated by statistical studies of quasar light curves and…
A new window to observing individual stars and other small sources at cosmological distances was opened recently, with the detection of several caustic-crossing events in galaxy cluster fields. Many more such events are expected soon from…
Caustics are high-density structures that form frequently in collisionless media. Under self-gravity, cold dark matter flows focus onto caustics which are yet to be resolved in numerical simulations and or observed in the real world. If…
We examine a caustic-straddling arc at $z=0.9397$ in the field of the galaxy cluster MACS J0416.1-2403 ($z=0.397$) using archival multiband HST images and show that its surface brightness exhibits anomalies that can be explained by a single…
Highly magnified stars at cosmological distances ($z \gtrsim 0.7$) become detectable thanks to microlensing by intracluster stars near the critical curves of galaxy clusters. Multi-epoch photometric campaigns targeting caustic crossing…
We report the analysis of the first resolved caustic-crossing binary-source microlensing event OGLE-2016-BLG-1003. The event is densely covered by the round-the-clock observations of three surveys. The light curve is characterized by two…
High amplification events (HAEs) are common phenomena in extragalactic gravitational lens systems (GLSs), where the multiple images of a distant quasar are observed through a foreground galaxy. There is a considerable brightness…
If cluster dark matter is in the form of compact objects it will introduce fluctuations into the light curves of distant sources. Current searches for MACHOs in clusters of galaxies focus on monitoring quasars behind nearby systems. This…
Extended stellar clusters with effective radii larger than 10 pc have been found in various environments. Objects with masses comparable to globular clusters (GCs) are called extended clusters (ECs), while objects with masses in the dwarf…
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…
Caustic crossing microlensing events provide us a unique opportunity to measure the relative proper motion of the lens to the source, and so those caused by binary MACHOs are of great importance for understanding the structure of the…
We fit binary lens models to the data covering the initial part of real microlensing events in an attempt to predict the time of the second caustic crossing. We use approximations during the initial search through the parameter space for…
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…
Microlensed stars recently discovered by JWST & HST follow closely the winding critical curve of A370 along all sections of the ``Dragon Arc" traversed by the critical curve. These transients are fainter than $m_{AB}>26.5$, corresponding to…
Massive Compact objects in the halo, known as MACHOs, have been postulated as the origin of a substantial fraction of `dark matter' known to exist in the haloes of galaxies$^{1,2}$. Paczy\'nski$^3$ has suggested that it might possible to…
Dark matter may be in the form of non-baryonic structures such as compact subhalos and boson stars. Structures weighing between asteroid and solar masses may be discovered via gravitational microlensing, an astronomical probe that has in…