Related papers: Microlensing by Stellar Black Holes Around Sgr A*
The inner few parsecs at the Galactic Center have come under intense scrutiny in recent years, in part due to the exciting broad-band observations of this region, but also because of the growing interest from theorists motivated to study…
The gravitational lensing of a finite star moving around a rotating Kerr black hole has been numerically calculated. Calculations for the direct image of the star and for the first and second light echoes have been performed for the star…
We describe a new method to search for gravitational microlensing toward the Galactic bulge that employs a small camera rather than a conventional telescope and probes new regions of parameter space. The small aperture (~65 mm) permits…
Most stellar remnants so far have been found in binary systems, where they interact with matter from their companions. Isolated neutron stars and black holes are difficult to find as they are dark, yet they are predicted to exist in our…
This is the second of three papers that search for the predicted stellar cusp around the Milky Way's central black hole, Sagittarius A*, with new data and methods. We aim to infer the distribution of the faintest stellar population…
During the months when the galactic bulge is visible from the southern hemisphere, there are typically about 8 to 10 on-going microlensing events at any given time. If the lensing stars have planets around them, then the signature of the…
Advances in VLBI instrumentation now allow wideband recording that significantly increases the sensitivity of short wavelength VLBI observations. Observations of the super-massive black hole candidate at the center of the Milky Way, SgrA*,…
Gravitational microlensing is a unique probe of the stellar content in strong lens galaxies. Flux ratio anomalies from gravitationally lensed supernovae (glSNe), just like lensed quasars, can be used to constrain the stellar mass fractions…
If the stellar population of the bulge contains black holes formed in the final core collapse of ordinary stars with M \ga 30 M_{\odot}, then about 25,000 stellar mass black holes should have migrated by dynamical friction into the central…
Many recent observational and theoretical studies suggest that globular clusters (GCs) host compact object populations large enough to play dominant roles in their overall dynamical evolution. Yet direct detection, particularly of black…
We describe the results of a search for microlensing events affecting stars in the outer bulge and inner disk of M31, due both to masses in M31 and the Galaxy. These observations, from 1994 and 1995 on the Vatican Advanced Technology…
We report measurements with the Very Long Baseline Array of the proper motion of Sgr A* relative to two extragalactic radio sources spanning 18 years. The apparent motion of Sgr A* is -6.411 +/- 0.008 mas/yr along the Galactic plane and…
The cores of most galaxies are thought to harbour supermassive black holes, which power galactic nuclei by converting the gravitational energy of accreting matter into radiation (ref 1). Sagittarius A*, the compact source of radio, infrared…
The supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy can be weighed, in rare but realistic cases, when the galaxy acts as a strong gravitational lens. The central image that should be produced by the lens is either destroyed or…
We report the results of a study aiming to detect signs of astrometric microlensing caused by an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) in the center of globular cluster M 22 (NGC 6656). We used archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope…
Proposed scaling relations of a characteristic timescale in the X-ray power spectral density of galactic and supermassive black holes have been used to argue that the accretion process is the same for small and large black holes. Here, we…
Light rays passing very close to a black hole may experience very strong deviations. Two geometries were separately considered in the recent literature: a source behind the black hole (standard gravitational lensing); a source in front of…
Microlensing has a unique advantage for detecting dark objects in the Milky Way, such as free-floating planets, neutron stars, and stellar-mass black holes. Most microlensing surveys focus on the Galactic bulge, where higher stellar density…
We describe the feasibility of detecting the gravitational deflection of light emitted by stars moving under the influence of the massive object at the Galactic center. Light emitted by a star orbiting behind the central mass has a smaller…
Massive stars at cosmological distances can be individually detected during transient microlensing events, when gravitational lensing magnifications may exceed ~1000. Nine such sources were identified in JWST NIRCam imaging of a single…