Related papers: Microlensing: Prospects for the Future
Gravitational microlensing is one of the methods to detect exoplanets; planets outside our solar system. Here we focus on theoretical modeling of three lens systems and in particular circumbinary systems. Circumbinary systems include two…
Microlensing has established itself as a powerful new method for the detection of baryonic dark matter in the Galaxy. The theory of microlensing is sketched and its similarity with the optical effect of twinkling is explained. The bulk of…
Pixel microlensing, i.e. gravitational microlensing of unresolved stars, can be used to explore distant stellar systems, and as a bonus may be able to detect extragalactic planets. In these studies, binary-lens events with multiple…
We propose a new procedure for measuring the spin of a black hole with an unprecedented accuracy based on the gravitational lensing of millisecond pulsars. We derive the basic equations for lensing by a rotating black hole. We show that the…
It has been shown by Paczy\'nski that gravitational microlensing is potentially a useful method for detecting the dark constituents of the halo of our galaxy, if their mass lies in the approximate domain $10^{-6}<M/M_\odot<10^{-1}$.…
While amongst the most luminous objects in the universe, many details regarding the inner structure of quasars remain unknown. One such area is the mechanism promoting increased polarisation in the broad absorption line troughs of certain…
A non-parametric statistical model is constructed to directly relate The distribution of observed microlens timescales to that of the mass Function of the population from which the lenses are drawn, corrected For observational selection…
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…
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…
Infrared-blocking scattering aerogel filters have a broad range of potential applications in astrophysics and planetary science observations in the far-infrared, sub-millimeter, and microwave regimes. Successful dielectric modeling of…
I present a somewhat selective review of microlensing theory, covering five major areas: 1) the derivation of the basic formulae, 2) the relation between the observables and the fundamental physical parameters, 3) binaries, 4) astrometric…
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…
Microlensing not only brings extra magnification lightcurves on top of the intrinsic ones but also shifts them in time domain, making the actual time-delays between images of strongly lensed active galactic nucleus change on the $\sim$…
Microlensing is generally studied in the geometric optics limit. However, diffraction may be important when nearby substellar objects lens occult distant stars. In particular the effects of diffraction become more important as the…
I review the observations of gravitationally lensed quasars. These systems are important because they allow us to probe the properties of the lensing galaxies at various scales, and they also allow insights into the structures of the…
We study the gravitational microlensing of various static and spherically symmetric non-singular black holes (and horizonless, non-singular compact objects of similar size). For pointlike sources we extend the parametrized post-Newtonian…
The current modelling of single microlensing light curves neglects the possibility that only a fraction of the light is due to the lensed star, the remaining being due to a close, unresolved blend, which may be related or unrelated to the…
In the pursuit of understanding the population of stellar remnants within the Milky Way, we analyze the sample of $\sim 950$ microlensing events observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope between 2014 and 2019. In this study we focus on a…
Primordial black holes, which could have formed during the early Universe through overdensities in primordial density fluctuations during inflation, are potential candidates for dark matter. We explore the use of lensing parallax of Gamma…
The discoveries of 17 microlensing event candidates have been reported over the last year by three teams conducting unprecedented mass photometric searches in the direction of the Galactic bulge and the Magellanic Clouds. These include 10…