Related papers: Defocusing gravitational microlensing
There is abundant evidence that the mass of the Universe is dominated by dark matter of unknown form. The MACHO project is one of several teams searching for the dark matter around our Galaxy in the form of Massive Compact Halo Objects…
The theory of gravitational lensing is reviewed from a spacetime perspective, without quasi-Newtonian approximations. More precisely, the review covers all aspects of gravitational lensing where light propagation is described in terms of…
Astrometric microlensing will offer in the next future a new channel for investigating the nature of both lenses and sources involved in a gravitational microlensing event. The effect, corresponding to the shift of the position of the…
The bending of lightrays by the gravitational field of a ``lens'' that is moving relative to the observer is calculated within the approximation of weak fields, small angles and thin lenses. Up to first order in $v/c$ -- and assuming the…
An intervening galaxy acts as a gravitational lens and produces multiple images of a single source such as a remote galaxy. Galaxies have peculiar speeds in addition to the bulk motion arising due to the expansion of the universe. There is…
Following previous suggestions of other researchers, this paper discusses the prospects for astrometric observation of MACHO gravitational microlensing events. We derive the expected astrometric observables for a simple microlensing event…
We study the theoretical signature of magnetic masses on the light curve of gravitational microlensing effect in NUT space. The light curves for microlensing events in NUT space are presented and contrasted with those due to lensing…
Geometric optics effectively describes the propagation of electromagnetic waves when the wavelength is much smaller than the characteristic length scale of the medium, making wave phenomena like diffraction negligible. As a result, light…
Gravitational lensing refers to the deflection of light by the gravity of celestial bodies, often predominantly composed of dark matter. Seen through a gravitational lens, the images of distant galaxies appear distorted. In this paper we…
We develop the spacetime approach to gravitational lensing by spherically symmetric perturbations of flat, cosmological constant-dominated Friedman-Robertson-Walker metrics. The geodesics of the spacetime are expressed as integral…
Gravitational lensing is a powerful probe of cosmology and astrophysics. With the prospect of the first strongly lensed gravitational waves on the horizon, we highlight an opportunity to test fundamental physics. In this work, we assume a…
We propose a novel concept of astrophysical mirroring in the schwarzschild framework, which emerges as a direct consequence of gravitational lensing effects occurring in the immediate vicinity of extremely dense massive objects within…
We study the influence of general lens and source velocities on the gravitational deflection of light by single and two-point-mass microlenses with general axis orientation. We demonstrate that in all cases the lens equation preserves its…
The long-standing problem of whether the cosmological constant affects directly the deflection of light caused by a gravitational lens is reconsidered. We use a new approach based on the Hawking quasilocal mass of a sphere grazed by light…
Frequency-dependent gravitational lens effects are found for trajectories of electromagnetic rays passing through a distribution of plasma near a massive object. Ray propagation through plasma adds extra terms to the equations of motion…
In this article we review the astrophysical application of gravitational microlensing. After introducing the history of gravitational lensing, we present the key equations and concept of microlensing. The most frequent microlensing events…
If an extended source, such as a galaxy, is gravitationally lensed by a massive object in the foreground, the lensing distorts the observed image. It is straightforward to simulate what the observed image would be for a particular lens and…
We investigate gravitational microlensing of point-like lenses surrounded by diffuse gas clouds. Besides gravitational bending, one must also consider refraction and absorption phenomena. According to the cloud density, the light curves may…
Gravitational lensing caused by the gravitational field of massive objects has been studied and acknowledged for a long period of time. In this paper, however, we propose a different mechanism where the bending of light stems from the…
Gravitational waves propagate along null geodesics like light rays in the geometrical optics approximation, and they may have a chance to suffer from gravitational lensing by intervening objects, as is the case for electromagnetic waves.…