Related papers: Microlensing induced absorption line variability
We report multi-epoch GMRT HI observations of the z = 0.3127 damped absorber towards the quasar PKS 1127-145, which reveal variability in both the absorption profile and the flux of the background source, over a time-scale of a few days.…
A moving mass makes a gravitational wake in the partially ionized interstellar medium, which acts as a lens for radio-frequency light. Consequently, plasma microlensing could complement gravitational microlensing in the search for invisible…
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,…
Numerical simulations and theoretical studies of the gravitational microlensing effect of a population of small bodies distributed along the line of sight to a compact light source such as a quasar indicate that caustic crossing effects…
Measuring dark matter substructure within galaxy cluster haloes is a fundamental probe of the Lambda-CDM model of structure formation. Gravitational lensing is a technique for measuring the total mass distribution which is independent of…
The micro-arcsecond scale structure of the seemingly point-like images in lensed quasars, though unobservable, is nevertheless much studied theoretically, because it affects the observable (or macro) brightness, and through that provides…
A gravitational lens model of the radio quasar B1422+231 is presented which can account for the image arrangement and approximately for the relative magnifications. The locations of the principal lensing mass and a more distant secondary…
We review theory and applications of weak gravitational lensing. After summarising Friedmann-Lemaitre cosmological models, we present the formalism of gravitational lensing and light propagation in arbitrary space-times. We discuss how…
A high optical depth to gravitational microlensing towards the galactic bulge is consistent with current models of the galactic bar. The low optical depth towards the LMC can probably be accounted for by the ordinary stars in our galaxy and…
We investigate gravitational lensing by a realistic model of disk galaxies. Most of the mass is contained in a large spherical isothermal dark matter halo, but the potential is modified significantly in the core by a…
Although controversial, the scenario of microlensing as the dominant mechanism for the long-term optical variability of quasars does provide a natural explanation for both the statistical symmetry, achromaticity and lack of cosmological…
Gravitational lensing offers unique opportunities to learn about the astrophysical origin of distant sources, the abundance of intervening objects acting as lenses, and gravity and cosmology in general. However, all this information can…
The study of dark matter substructure through strong gravitational lensing has shown enormous promise in probing the properties of dark matter on sub-galactic scales. This approach has already been used to place strong constraints on a wide…
We discuss about how the relative flux densities among the images of gravitationally-lensed active galactic nuclei, AGN, can be used to study the intrinsic AGN variability with high accuracy. Multi-frequency monitoring observations of…
Microlensing is now a very popular observational astronomical technique. The investigations accessible through this effect range from the dark matter problem to the search for extra-solar planets. In this review, the techniques to search…
The nature of the dark matter remains a mystery. The possibility of an unstable dark matter particle decaying to invisible daughter particles has been explored many times in the past few decades. Meanwhile, weak gravitational lensing shear…
Using infrared spectra of the z = 1.693 quadruply lensed quasar HE0435-1223 acquired in 2009 with the spectrograph SINFONI at the ESO Very Large Telescope, we have detected a clear microlensing effect in images A and D. While microlensing…
We propose and discuss a new experimental approach to measure the centroid shift induced by gravitational microlensing in the images of lensed quasars (astrometric microlensing). Our strategy is based on taking the photocenter of a region…
Gravitational microlensing has become a mature technique for discovering small gravitational lenses in the Universe which are otherwise beyond our detection limits. Similarly, plasma microlensing can help us explore cosmic plasma lenses.…
The traditional perturbative method is applied to the case of gravitational lensing of planetary systems. A complete and detailed description of the structure of caustics for a system with an arbitrary number of planets can be obtained. I…