Related papers: Microlensing of Elliptical Sources by Fold Caustic…
The possibility that stellar mass primordial black holes may make up at least a significant fraction of dark matter has recently received much attention, partly as a result of gravitational wave observations, but more specifically from…
(Abridged) The solar system gas giant planets are oblate due to their rapid rotation. A measurement of the planet's projected oblateness would constrain the planet's rotational period. Planets that are synchronously rotating with their…
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…
Microlensing near macro-caustics is a complex phenomenon in which swarms of micro-images produced by micro-caustics form on both sides of a macro-critical curve. Recent discoveries of highly magnified images of individual stars in massive…
Spotted stars in eclipsing binary systems allow us to gather significant information about the stellar surface inhomogeneities that is otherwise impossible from only photometric data. Starspots can be scanned using the eclipse (or transit)…
A microlensing lensing zone refers to the range of planet-star separations where the probability of detecting a planetary signal is high. Its conventional definition as the range between $\sim 0.6$ and 1.6 Einstein radii of the primary lens…
First, we review the current status of the detection of strong `external' variability in the CLASS gravitational B1600+434, focusing on the 1998 VLA 8.5-GHz and 1998/9 WSRT multi-frequency observations. We show that this data can best be…
We investigate the feasibility of reconstructing the radial intensity profile of extended stellar sources by inverting their microlensed light curves. Using a simple, linear, limb darkening law as an illustration, we show that the intensity…
The first investigations of the response of the microlensing magnification pattern (at an optical depth of order unity) to the mass function of the microlenses found that the resulting statistics depend only on the mean microlens mass <m>.…
Gravitational microlensing at cosmological distances is potentially a powerful tool for probing the mass functions of stars and compact objects in other galaxies. In the case of multiply-imaged quasars, microlensing data has been used to…
Recent discoveries of circumbinary planets in Kepler data show that there is a viable channel of planet formation around binary main sequence stars. Motivated by these discoveries, we have investigated the caustic structures and…
We investigate the pattern of anomalies in the light curves of caustic-crossing binary microlensing events induced by spot(s) on the lensed source star. For this purpose, we perform simulations of events with various models of spots. From…
Extreme microlensing events, defined as events with maximum magnification $A_\max\gsim 200$ are a potentially powerful probe of the mass spectrum and spatial distribution of objects along lines of sight toward the Galactic bulge. About 75…
RX J1131-1231 is a gravitationally lensed system which includes four images of a quasar lensed by an elliptical galaxy. The flux in the individual images is known to be affected by microlensing effect in the visible and X-ray bands. We…
The offset microlensing degeneracy, recently proposed by Zhang et al. (2022), has been shown to generalize the close-wide and inner-outer caustic degeneracies into a unified regime of magnification degeneracy in the interpretation of 2-body…
We investigate the chance of detecting proto-planetary or debris disks in stars that induce microlensing events (lenses). The modification of the light curves shapes due to occultation and extinction by the disks as well as the additional…
We investigate the prospects for characterizing extrasolar giant planets by measuring planetary oblateness from transit photometry and inferring planetary rotational periods. The rotation rates of planets in the solar system vary widely,…
Dense high-precision photometry of microlensed stars during a fold-caustic passage can be used to reveal their intensity profiles from which the temperature of the stellar atmosphere as function of fractional radius can be derived. While…
A fast and practical method is described for calculating the microlensed flux variance of an arbitrary source by uncorrelated stars. The required inputs are the mean convergence and shear due to the smoothed potential of the lensing galaxy,…
We report the analysis of the first resolved caustic-crossing binary-source microlensing event OGLE-2016-BLG-1003. The event is densely covered by the round-the-clock observations of three surveys. The light curve is characterized by two…