Related papers: Microlensing of Quasars
Gravitational lensing has become one of the most interesting tools to study the mass distribution in the Universe. Since gravitational light deflection is independent of the nature and state of the matter, it is ideally suited to…
Gas in the interstellar matter is generally organized in filamentary structures, which may be also relevant for a complementary explanation of the dark matter in the Galactic halo. We examine the possibility that such structures may act as…
Recent models for the emission clouds within the Broad Line Region of quasars suggest that they are due to transient overdensities within an overall turbulent medium. If this were the case, the broad line emission would spatially appear…
Gravitational microlensing is a very useful tool for investigating the innermost part of lensed quasars, especially for studying a relativistic accretion disk around a massive black hole (BH) supposed to exist in a quasar's center. Here we…
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…
Gravitational lenses can provide crucial information on the geometry of the Universe, on the cosmological scenario of formation of its structures as well as on the history of its components with look-back time. In this review, I focus on…
One of the most important problems in astrophysics concerns the nature of the dark matter in galactic halos, whose presence is implied mainly by the observed flat rotation curves in spiral galaxies. In the framework of a baryonic scenario…
We re-analyze brightness data sampled intensively over 5 nights at two epochs separated by the quasar lens time delay, to examine the nature of the observed microlensing. We find strong evidence for a microlensing event with an amplitude of…
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…
Experiments are looking for diffuse brown dwarfs in the dark galactic halo through the gravitational lens effect. If brown dwarfs are clumped in dark clusters, the event rate is not changed, but events are spatially clustered, and stars…
The light we observe from distant astrophysical objects including supernovae and quasars allows us to determine large distances in terms of a cosmological model. Despite the success of the standard cosmological model in fitting the data,…
Gravitational Lensing is a UNIQUE tool to constrain the mass distribution of collapsed structures, this is particularly true for galaxies, either on a case by case basis using multiple images of background sources (such as quasars), or…
The flux-ratio anomalies observed in multiply-lensed quasar images are most plausibly explained as the result of perturbing structures superposed on the underlying smooth matter distribution of the primary lens. The cold dark matter…
Several gravitationally lensed quasars are observed with anomalous magnifications in pairs of images that straddle a critical curve. Simple theoretical arguments suggest that the magnification of these images should be approximately…
Cosmological gravitational microlensing is a useful technique for understanding the structure of the inner parts of a quasar, especially the accretion disk and the central supermassive black hole. So far, most of the cosmological…
Gravitational lensing is one of a number of methods used to probe the distribution of dark mass in the Universe. On galactic scales, complementary techniques include the use of stellar kinematics, kinematics and morphology of the neutral…
In a recent paper, Hawkins (1997) argues on the basis of statistical studies of double-image gravitational lenses and lens candidates that a large population of dark lenses exists and that these outnumber galaxies with more normal…
The existence of dark matter is supported by multiple astrophysical observations, yet its particle nature remains unknown. The development of gravitational wave astronomy, especially with future space-based detectors such as LISA, provides…
Contrary to naive expectation, diluting the stellar component of the lensing galaxy in a highly magnified system with smoothly distributed ``dark'' matter increases rather than decreases the microlensing fluctuations caused by the remaining…
After exactly a century since the formulation of the general theory of relativity, the phenomenon of gravitational lensing is still an extremely powerful method for investigating in astrophysics and cosmology. Indeed, it is adopted to study…