Related papers: Self-Lensing By Binaries
Many short-period binary stars have distant orbiting companions that have played a role in driving the binary components into close separation. Indirect detection of a tertiary star is possible by measuring apparent changes in eclipse times…
Galaxy mergers lead to the formation of massive black hole binaries which can accelerate background stars close to the speed of light. We estimate the comoving density of ejected stars with a peculiar velocity in excess of $0.1c$ or $0.5c$…
If the Galaxy contains ~10^{11}M_sol in cold gas clouds of ~Jovian mass and \~AU size, these clouds will act as converging lenses for optical light, magnifying background stars at a detectable rate. The resulting light curves can resemble…
Microlensing light curves are now being monitored with the precision required to detect small perturbations due to planetary companions of the primary lens. Microlensing is complementary to other planetary search techniques in its potential…
Five self-lensing binaries (SLBs) have been discovered with Kepler light curves. They contain white dwarfs (WDs) in AU-scale orbits that gravitationally lens solar-type companions. Forming SLBs likely requires common envelope evolution when…
We demonstrate that gravitational lensing can be used to discover and study planets in the habitable zones of nearby dwarf stars. If appropriate software is developed, a new generation of monitoring programs will automatically conduct a…
Transiting planets manifest themselves by a periodic dimming of their host star by a fixed amount. On the other hand, light curves of transiting circumbinary (CB) planets are expected to be neither periodic nor to have a single depth while…
A nearby star having a near-transit of a galaxy will cause a time-dependent weak lensing of the galaxy. Because the effect is small, we refer to this as weak microlensing. This could provide a useful method to weigh low-mass stars and brown…
A possible wave effect in the gravitational lensing phenomenon is discussed. We consider the interference of two coherent gravitational waves of slightly different frequencies from a compact binary, due to the gravitational lensing by a…
Moderately close binaries are a special class of targets for planet searches. From a theoretical standpoint, their hospitality to giant planets is uncertain and debated. From an observational standpoint, many of these systems present…
It is shown that the lens equation for a binary gravitational lens being a set of two coupled real fifth-order algebraic equations (equivalent to a single complex equation of the same order) can be reduced to a single real fifth-order…
Close binary central stars of planetary nebulae are key in constraining the poorly-understood common-envelope phase of evolution, which in turn is critical in understanding the formation of a wide-range of astrophysical phenomena (including…
We examine recent studies on the formation rate of planetary nebulae and find this rate to be about one-third of the formation rate of white dwarfs. This implies than only about one-third of all planetary nebulae that evolve to form white…
We investigate the effects of gravitational lensing in the binary pulsar system J0737-3039. Current measurement of the orbital inclination allows the millisecond pulsar (A) to pass very close (at R_{min}=4000 km) in projection to the…
Microlensing studies of quasars can reveal dark matter lumps over a broad mass spectrum; we highlight the importance of monitoring quasars which are seen through the halos of low-redshift galaxies. For these configurations microlensing by…
Compact binary systems coalesce over time due to the radiation of gravitational waves, following the field equations of general relativity. Conservation of energy and angular momentum gives a mathematical description for the evolution of…
Occultation and microlensing are different limits of the same phenomena of one body passing in front of another body. We derive a general exact analytic expression which describes both microlensing and occultation in the case of spherical…
In this paper I show that the concept of relativistic beaming -- the process by which light emitted by a fast moving sources is lensed towards the direction of motion -- can be easily extended to model the signal from both the star and any…
We report the discovery and the analysis of the short timescale binary-lens microlensing event, MOA-2015-BLG-337. The lens system could be a planetary system with a very low mass host, around the brown dwarf/planetary mass boundary, or a…
If the unexpectedly high frequency of quasar pairs with very different component redshifts is due to the lensing of a population of background quasars by the foreground quasar, typical lens masses must be $\sim10^{12}M_{\sun}$ and the sum…