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We present the telltale signature of the tidal capture and disruption of an object by a massive black hole in a galactic centre. As a result of the interaction with the black hole's strong gravitational field, the object's light curve can…
Two different model-independent mapping techniques have been applied to OSSE, SMM, TGRS and balloon data and reveal a feature in the 0.511 MeV electron-positron annihilation radiation pattern of our galaxy centered roughly at l=-2 deg. and…
The disturbance of the transmission of light through a diffusive medium due to an object hidden in it can be expressed in terms of an effective charge and dipole moment. In the mesoscopic regime, beyond the diffusion approximation, we…
We generalize the notion of the Franhoufer diffraction from a single slit and a circular aperture to the case of partially temporal coherent and quasimonochromatic light. The problem is studied analytically and the effect of coherence…
We study microlensing of the faint images that form close to the centers of strong gravitational lens galaxies. These central images, which have finally begun to yield to observations, naturally appear in dense stellar fields and may be…
Episodically accreting black holes are thought to produce flares when a chunk of particles is accelerated to high velocity near the black hole horizon. This also seems to be the case of Sagittarius A* in the Galactic Center, where the…
The detection of microlensing events from stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud and in the Galactic bulge raise important constraints on the distribution of dark matter and on galactic structure, although some events may be due to a new type…
We investigate optical characteristics of flashes caused by impacting meter- to decameter-sized outer solar system objects on Jupiter and contributions of reflected light from surface clouds at visible wavelengths to estimate more accurate…
High-accuracy dimensional measurements by laser interferometers require corrections because of diffraction, which makes the effective fringe-period different from the wavelength of a plane (or spherical) wave $\lambda_0$. By using a…
This is a pedagogical review of recent results on the interactions of central massive black holes with stars very near them, focused on the black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Table of contents: [1] Introduction [2] Stellar dynamics…
Matter and dark matter in galaxies represent two main components linked by the gravitational interaction. Collisions of galaxies may create an offset between the centers of mass of these components. Ignoring internal dynamics of particles…
Most massive galaxies are thought to contain a supermassive black hole in their centre surrounded by a tenuous gas environment, leading to no significant emission. In these quiescent galaxies, tidal disruption events represent a powerful…
We study the optical properties of crystals with spatial dispersion and show that the usual Fresnel approach becomes invalid near frequencies where the group velocity of the wave packets inside the crystal vanishes. Near these special…
The effect of gravitational microlensing on the intensity of gravitational radiation as it propagates through an inhomogeneous medium containing small-scale structure is considered. Lensing by both stars and a power law spectrum of density…
During the tidal disruption of a star by a massive black hole (BH) of mass MBH <~ 10^7 Msun, stellar debris falls back to the BH at a rate well above the Eddington rate. A fraction of this gas is subsequently blown away from the BH,…
Knowledge of the Kuiper Belt is currently limited to those objects that can be detected directly. Objects with diameters less than $\sim$10km reflect too little light to be detected. These smaller bodies could contain most of the mass in…
Microlensing is generally studied in the geometric optics limit. However, diffraction may be important when nearby substellar objects lens occult distant stars. In particular the effects of diffraction become more important as the…
A device consisted of a set of circular rings, the centers of which lie on an axis, behaves like a solenoid when the ratio of its radius and distance between two successive rings is greater than one. As this ratio decreases, the device…
Stars twinkle to the eye through atmospheric turbulence, but planets, because of their larger angular size, do not. Similarly, scintillation due to the local interstellar medium will modulate the radio flux of gamma-ray-burst afterglows and…
Opacity enhancements for stellar interior conditions have been explored to explain observed pulsation frequencies and to extend the pulsation instability region for B-type main-sequence variable stars. For these stars, the pulsations are…