Related papers: Variable polarisation and luminosity for microlens…
Planets reflect and linearly polarize the radiation that they receive from their host stars. The emergent polarization is sensitive to aspects of the planet atmosphere such as the gas composition and the occurrence of condensates and their…
Microlensing event MACHO 97-SMC-1 is one of the rare microlensing events for which the source is a variable star, simply because most variable stars are systematically eliminated from microlensing studies. Using observational data for this…
During microlensing events with a small impact parameter, the amplification of the source flux is sensitive to the surface brightness distribution of the source star. Such events provide a means for studying the surface structure of target…
Gravitational lensing is brightening of background objects due to deflection of light by foreground sources. Rich clusters of galaxies are very effective lenses because they are centrally concentrated. Such natural Gravitational Telescopes…
Astrophysical polarization measurements provide some of the strongest constraints on the photon sector of the non-minimal Standard-Model Extension. This paper reviews some recent results obtained by combining optical linear and circular…
From the nature of dark matter to the rate of expansion of our Universe, observations of distant galaxies distorted through strong gravitational lensing have the potential to answer some of the major open questions in astrophysics. Modeling…
The fraction of high-redshift sources which are multiply-imaged by intervening galaxies is strongly dependent on the cosmological constant, and so can be a useful probe of the cosmological model. However its power is limited by various…
An extra-solar planet can be detected by microlensing because the planet can perturb the smooth lensing light curve created by the primary lens. However, it was shown by Gaudi that a subset of binary-source events can produce light curves…
We address two selection effects that operate on samples of gravitationally lensed dusty galaxies identified in millimeter- and submillimeter-wavelength surveys. First, we point out the existence of a "size bias" in such samples: due to…
An extrasolar planet can be detected via microlensing from the perturbation it makes in the smooth lensing light curve of the primary. In addition to the conventional photometric microlensing, astrometric observation of the center-of-light…
We investigate how galaxy-galaxy lensing measurements depend on the knowledge of redshifts for lens and source galaxies. Galaxy-galaxy lensing allows one to study dark matter halos of galaxies statistically using weak gravitational lensing.…
Characterization of microlensing planets requires modeling of observed light curves including many parameters. Studying the dependency of the pattern of light curves on the lensing parameters and the correlations between the parameters is…
The mass function and statistics of binaries provide important diagnostics of the star formation process. Despite this importance, the mass function at low masses remains poorly known due to observational difficulties caused by the…
The centres of galaxies are powerful laboratories to test the current $\Lambda$CDM model for structure formation and evolution. While these sub-galactic scales can be directly investigated in the local Universe, it is observationally…
The effect of stars on the lensing properties of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center is similar to the effect of planets on microlensing by a star. We show that the dense stellar cluster around SgrA* increases by factors of a…
We present a three-dimensional model of polarised galactic dust emission that takes into account the variation of the dust density, spectral index and temperature along the line of sight, and contains randomly generated small scale…
Here I summarize constraints on the nature of the dark matter halos of field galaxies that have been obtained from the most recent investigations of (i) weak galaxy-galaxy lensing and (ii) the dynamics of satellite galaxies in orbit about…
We have derived the relationship between polarization and intensity fluctuations due to point sources. In the case of a Poisson distribution of a population with uniform evolution properties and constant polarization degree, polarization…
Interstellar polarization from aligned dust grains can be measured both in transmission at visible and near-infrared wavelengths and in emission at far-infrared and sub-mm wavelengths. These observations can help predict the behavior of…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) represents a unique source for the study of gravitational lensing. It is extended across the entire sky, partially polarized, located at the extreme distance of z=1100, and is thought to have the…