Related papers: Ultra-high angular resolution by gravitational mic…
Though stellar-mass black holes (BHs) are likely abundant in the Milky Way (N=10^8-10^9), only ~20 have been detected to date, all in accreting binary systems (Casares 2006). Gravitational microlensing is a proposed technique to search for…
It is conventional to calculate the probability of microlensing for a cosmologically distant source based on the Press-Gunn approximation that the lensing objects are uniformly and randomly distributed in the intervening space with a…
We report the serendipitous detection of a very bright, very nearby microlensing event. In late October 2006, an otherwise unremarkable A0 star at a distance ~1 kpc (GSC 3656-1328) brightened achromatically by a factor of nearly 40 over the…
We present an efficient method for computing lightcurves of an elliptical source which is microlensed by a point mass. The amplification of an extended source involves a two-dimensional integral over its surface brightness distribution. We…
Extended dark matter (DM) substructures may play the role of microlenses in the Milky Way and in extragalactic gravitational lens systems (GLSs). We compare microlensing effects caused by point masses (Schwarzschild lenses) and extended…
Variability studies are a powerful tool for studying the structures of unresolved sources. One such type of variability study, called reverberation mapping (RM), established that the dominant source of infrared radiation from an active…
The fuelling of active galactic nuclei (AGN) - via material propagated through the galactic disc or via minor mergers - is expected to leave an imprint on the alignment of the sub-pc disc relative to the host galaxy's stellar disc.…
The structure of the accretion flow onto supermassive black holes (SMBH) is not well understood. Standard disc models match to zeroth order in predicting substantial energy dissipation within optically-thick material producing a…
A long-standing problem of strong lensing by galaxy clusters regards the observed high rate of giant gravitational arcs as compared to the predictions in the framework of the "standard" cosmological model. Recently, few other…
We analyse the stellar kinematics of the z=0.169 brightest cluster galaxy (BCG) in Abell 1201, using integral field observations with VLT/MUSE. This galaxy has a gravitationally-lensed arc located at unusually small radius ($\sim$5 kpc),…
We analyse the effects on the predictions for the microlensing searches toward the Galactic bulge coming from the fact that not all the stars monitored belong to the bulge itself, but that a non--negligible fraction of them actually are in…
We give the distribution of $M_n$, the maximum of a sequence of $n$ observations from a moving average of order 1. Solutions are first given in terms of repeated integrals and then for the case where the underlying independent random…
Strong gravitational lensing by irregular mass distributions, such as galaxy clusters, is generally not well quantified by cross sections of analytic mass models. Computationally expensive ray-tracing methods have so far been necessary for…
We present new models for the formation of disk galaxies that improve upon previous models by following the detailed accretion and cooling of the baryonic mass, and by using realistic distributions of specific angular momentum. Under the…
This study explores the space density and properties of active galaxies to z=0.8. We have investigated the frequency and nature of unresolved nuclei in galaxies at moderate redshift as indicators of nuclear activity such as Active Galactic…
The expected microlensing events of the LMC by the MACHOs of the LMC itself are calculated and compared with analogue events by objects in the Galactic halo. The LMC matter distribution is modelled by a spherical halo and an exponential…
Gravitational microlensing is a robust tool to detect and directly measure the abundance and mass of any kind of compact objects, either in our galaxy or in the extragalatic domain. On basis to generic, broadly applicable arguments, it is…
We carried out numerical experiments on the evaluation of the possibilities of obtaining the information about brightness distributions for the components of eclipsing variables from the data of high-precision photometry expected for…
In Paper I we studied the theory of gravitational microlensing for a planar distribution of point masses. In this second paper, we extend the analysis to a three-dimensional lens distribution. First we study the lensing properties of…
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…