Related papers: Bright Lenses and Optical Depth
Gravitational lensing - the deflection of light rays by gravitating matter - has become a major tool in the armoury of the modern cosmologist. Proposed nearly a hundred years ago as a key feature of Einstein's theory of General Relativity,…
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 order to use a gravitational lens to measure the Hubble constant accurately, it is necessary to derive a reliable model of the lens surface potential. If the analysis is restricted to the locations and magnifications of point images, the…
In a strong gravitational lensing system, the distorted light from a source is analysed to infer the properties of the lens. However, light emitted by the lens itself can contaminate the image of the source, introducing systematic errors in…
The inner regions of active galaxies host the most extreme and energetic phenomena in the universe including, relativistic jets, supermassive black hole binaries, and recoiling supermassive black holes. However, many of these sources cannot…
An overview is given on those theoretical gravitational lensing results that can be formulated in a spacetime setting, without assuming that the gravitational fields are weak and that the bending angles are small. The first part is devoted…
Whereas considerable effort has been afforded in understanding the properties of galaxies, a full physical picture, connecting their baryonic and dark-matter content, super-massive black holes, and (metric) theories of gravity, is still…
Many strong gravitational lenses lie in complex environments, such as poor groups of galaxies, that significantly bias conclusions from lens analyses. We are undertaking a photometric survey of all known galaxy-mass strong lenses to…
Given an observed gravitational lens mirage produced by a foreground deflector (cf. galaxy, quasar, cluster,...), it is possible via numerical lens inversion to retrieve the real source image, taking full advantage of the magnifying power…
General relativity provides an appropriate framework for addressing the issue of sub- or superluminality as an apparent effect. Even though a massless particle travels on the light cone, its average velocity over a finite path measured by…
In this speculative, millenial essay, I try to anticipate what sort of novel gravitational optics investigations might be observed, after it becomes possible to map and monitor roughly a trillion sources (of which a billion may be usefully…
We calculate the abundance of dark-matter concentrations that are sufficiently overdense to produce a detectable weak-gravitational-lensing signal. Most of these overdensities are virialized halos containing identifiable X-ray and/or…
Gravitational microlensing is a robust tool to detect and directly measure the abundance and mass of any kind of compact objects, either in our galaxy or in the extragalatic domain. On basis to generic, broadly applicable arguments, it is…
The observed properties of high redshift galaxies depend on the underlying foreground distribution of large scale structure, which distorts their intrinsic properties via gravitational lensing. We focus on the regime where the dominant…
Cold dark matter (CDM) constitutes most of the matter in the Universe. The interplay between dark and luminous matter in dense cosmic environments like galaxy clusters is studied theoretically using cosmological simulations. Observed…
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…
Recent results from gravitational lensing are combined with new modeling of the stellar velocity distributions in nearby galaxies to probe the connection between the luminous and the dark matter in elliptical galaxies. From analysing a…
We study the effect of the cosmological constant on the statistical properties of gravitational lenses in flat cosmologies (Omega_{0}+lambda_{0} = 1). It is shown that some of the lens observables are strongly affected by the cosmological…
Gravitational lenses can provide crucial information on the geometry of the Universe, on the cosmological scenario of formation of its structures as well as on the history of its components with look-back time. In this review, I focus on…
Gravitational lensing is an invaluable probe of the nature of dark matter, and the structures it forms. Lensed gravitational waves in particular allow for unparalleled sensitivity to small scale structures within the lenses, due to the…