Related papers: Gravitational Microlensing by Rotating Stars
According to general relativity, a spinning body of mass M and angular momentum S, like a star or a planet, generates a gravitomagnetic field which induces, among other phenomena, also the Lense-Thirring effect, i.e. secular precessions of…
Dark matter may be in the form of non-baryonic structures such as compact subhalos and boson stars. Structures weighing between asteroid and solar masses may be discovered via gravitational microlensing, an astronomical probe that has in…
Gravitational microlensing is unique in detecting binary black (BH) holes with wide (a few au) separations. Models predict that about $1\%$ of microlensing binaries should be due to binary BHs, and yet zero has been robustly identified.…
We investigate the possibility of identifying massive objects (lenses) in the Galactic Center region (GC) by means of pulsar timing. The well known intensity change due to microlensing is found to be less important. For typical stellar…
Gravitational microlensing of planetary-mass objects (or "nanolensing", as it has been termed) can be used to probe the distribution of mass in a galaxy that is acting as a gravitational lens. Microlensing and nanolensing light curve…
We show that at any given time, the Galactocentric black hole Sgr A* is expected to be microlensing N(lens)=1.7 bulge stars if the threshold of detectability of the fainter image is K(thr)=21, and about N(lens)=8 sources if K(thr)=23. The…
Fundamental and applied concepts concerning the ability of light beams to carry a certain mechanical angular momentum with respect to the propagation axis are reviewed and discussed. Following issues are included: Historical reference;…
A long-standing problem in astrophysics is to measure the mass associated with galaxies. Gravitational lensing provides one of the cleanest ways to make this measurement. To date, the most powerful lensing probes of galactic mass have been…
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…
Gravitational waves (GW) from chirping binary black holes (BBHs) provide unique opportunities to test general relativity (GR) in the strong-field regime. However, testing GR can be challenging when incomplete physical modeling of the…
Gravitational lensing events provide unique opportunities to discover and study planetary systems and binaries. Here we build on previous work to explore the role that orbital motion can play in both identifying and learning more about…
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…
The distortion of the spacetime structure in the surroundings of black holes affects the trajectories of light rays. As a consequence, black holes can act as gravitational lenses. Observations of type Ia supernovas, show that our Universe…
In this paper, we investigate the applicability of the astrometric method to the determination of the lens parameters for gravitational microlensing events toward both the LMC and the Galactic bulge. For this analysis, we investigate the…
We study the strong gravitational lensing on the equatorial plane of a quasi-Kerr compact object with arbitrary quadrupole moments which can be used to model the super-massive central object of the galaxy. We find that, when the quadrupolar…
The magnification induced by gravitational microlensing is sensitive to the size of a source relative to the Einstein radius, the natural microlensing scale length. This paper investigates the effect of source size in the case where the…
We report on the first results from a large-scale observing campaign aiming to use astrometric microlensing to detect and place limits on the mass of single objects, including stellar remnants. We used the Hubble Space Telescope to monitor…
The goal of this paper is to investigate the detection by GRAVITY of different relativistic effects affecting the astrometric and/or spectroscopic observations of S2 such as the transverse Doppler shift, the gravitational redshift, the…
It is shown that an arbitrarily small amount of angular momentum can qualitatively change the properties of extremal charged black holes coupled to a dilaton. In addition, the gyromagnetic ratio of these black holes is computed and an exact…
Gravitational lensing is a powerful tool to detect compact matter on very different mass scales. Of particular importance is the fact that lensing is sensitive to both luminous and dark matter alike. Depending on the mass scale, all lensing…