Related papers: Variable polarisation and luminosity for microlens…
This is a personal review of various issues related to massive photometric and astrometric searches. A complete inventory of variable stars down to almost any magnitude limit will improve our understanding of the stellar evolution and the…
Gravitational microlensing is a new technique for studying the surfaces of distant stars. A point mass lens, usually a low-mass star from the disk, will typically resolve the surface of a red giant in the Galactic bulge, as well as amplify…
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,…
Gravitational lensing deflects light. A single lens deflector can only shear images, but cannot induce rotations. Multiple lens planes can induce rotations. Such rotations can be observed in quadruply imaged sources, and can be used to…
With the increasing number of experiments dedicated to the observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background, interest on the detailed properties of the foreground Galactic emission has risen. In particular the focus is shifting towards…
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…
Most surveys for multiply-imaged gravitational lenses, outside of rich galaxy clusters, are based on sifting through large samples of distant sources to identify the rare examples of lensing. An alternative strategy, based on the selection…
We investigate microlensing in the case where the lens is considered as an extended object. We use a multipolar expansion of the lens potential and show that the time-varying nature of the quadrupole contribution allows to separate it from…
Increasing evidences suggest that the Galactic halo is lumpy on kpc scales due to the accretion of at least a dozen small galaxies (LMC/SMC, Sgr, Fornax etc.). Faint stars in such lumpy structures can significant microlense a background…
As is known, resonant scattering can distort the surface-brightness profiles of clusters of galaxies in X-ray lines. We demonstrate that the scattered line emission should be polarized and possibly detectable with near-future X-ray…
Massive Compact objects in the halo, known as MACHOs, have been postulated as the origin of a substantial fraction of `dark matter' known to exist in the haloes of galaxies$^{1,2}$. Paczy\'nski$^3$ has suggested that it might possible to…
Weak gravitational lensing of distant galaxies by foreground structures has proven to be a powerful tool to study the mass distribution in the universe. The advent of panoramic cameras on 4m class telescope has led to a first generation of…
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…
Foundations of standard theory of microlensing are described, namely we consider microlensing stars in Galactic bulge, the Magellanic Clouds or other nearby galaxies. We suppose that gravitational microlenses lie between an Earth observer…
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…
If a source star is gravitationally microlensed by a multiple lens system, the resulting light curve can have significant deviations from the standard form of a single lens event. The chance to produce significant deviations becomes…
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…
We study the colour changes induced by blending in a wormhole-like microlensing scenario with extended sources. The results are compared with those obtained for limb darkening. We assess the possibility of an actual detection of the colour…
Gravitational lensing can be used to directly constrain the projected density profile of galaxy clusters. We discuss possible future constraints from lensing of the CMB temperature and polarization, and compare to results from galaxy weak…
Many recent studies have demonstrated that scaling arguments, such as the so-called hierarchical {\em ansatz}, are extremely useful in understanding the statistical properties of weak gravitational lensing. This is especially true on small…