Related papers: Gravitational microlensing as a test of stellar mo…
Microlensing of stars in strongly lensed galaxies can lead to temporary extreme magnification factors ($\mu\!>\!1000$), enabling their detection at high redshifts. Following the discovery of Icarus, several stars at cosmological distances…
Hundreds of gravitational microlensing events have now been detected towards the Galactic bulge, with many more to come. The detection of fine structure in these events has been theorized to be an excellent way to discover extra-solar…
We qualitatively study the effects of gravitational microlensing on our view of unresolved extragalactic star formation regions. Using a general gravitational microlensing configuration, we perform a number of simulations that reveal that…
Applications of the phase space approach to the calculation of the microlensing autocorrelation function are presented. The continuous propagation equation for a random star field with a Gaussian velocity distribution is solved in the…
The multi-messenger observation of GW170817 enabled the first historic measurement of the Hubble constant via a standard siren, so-called in analogy to standard candles that enabled the measurement of the luminosity distance versus redshift…
Microlensing surveys search for the transient brightening of a background star that is the signature of gravitational lensing by a foreground compact object. This technique is an elegant way to search for astrophysical candidates that might…
Gravitational lensing directly measures mass density fluctuations along the lines of sight to very distant objects. No assumptions need to be made concerning bias, the ratio of fluctuations in galaxy density to mass density. Hence, lensing…
The occultation of background stars by foreground Solar system objects, such as planets and asteroids, has been widely used as an observational probe to study physical properties associated with the foreground sample. Similarly, the…
With the steady increase of the sample size of observed microlenses towards the central regions of the Galaxy, the main source of the uncertainty in the lens mass will shift from the simple Poisson noise to the intrinsic non-uniqueness of…
The numerical kernel approach to difference imaging has been implemented and applied to gravitational microlensing events observed by the PLANET collaboration. The effect of an error in the source-star coordinates is explored and a new…
The gravitational lensing signal produced by a galaxy or a galaxy cluster is determined by its total matter distribution, providing us with a way to directly constrain their dark matter content. State-of-the-art numerical simulations…
We report the discovery of transients among star clusters in a distant galaxy that is gravitationally lensed by a foreground galaxy cluster, and explore whether these transients correspond to: (i) intrinsic variations associated with…
We analyze the first-year MACHO collaboration observations of microlensing towards the Galactic center using a new direct likelihood technique that is sensitive to the distribution of the events on the sky. We consider the full set of 41…
Gravitational lensing by clusters of galaxies offers a powerful probe of their structure and mass distribution. Deriving a lens magnification map for a galaxy cluster is a classic inversion problem and many methods have been developed over…
This is a preliminary report on the application of Difference Image Analysis (DIA) to galactic bulge images. The aim of this analysis is to increase the sensitivity to the detection of gravitational microlensing. We discuss how the DIA…
We explore the usefulness of future gravitational microlensing surveys in the study of binary properties such as the binary fraction and the distributions of binary separation and mass ratio by using the binary sample detectable through a…
We show that a space-based gravitational microlensing survey for terrestrial extra-solar planets is feasible in the near future, and could provide a nearly complete picture of the properties of planetary systems in our Galaxy. We present…
If planetary systems are ubiquitous then a fraction of stars should possess a transiting planet when being microlensed. This paper presents a study of the influence of such planets on microlensing light curves. For the giant planets…
The microlensing of background stars by compact objects in globular clusters is analyzed. The main strength of the proposed search is the direct relationship between the lens mass and the time scale of the microlensing event. The main…
The gravitational fields of astrophysical bodies bend the light around them, creating multiple paths along which light from a distant source can arrive at Earth. Measuring the difference in photon arrival time along these different paths…