Related papers: Evidence for substructure in lens galaxies?
Gravitational microlensing is a powerful tool to probe the inner structure of strongly lensed quasars and to constrain parameters of the stellar mass function of lens galaxies. This is done by analysing microlensing light curves between the…
The physical nature of the material responsible for the high--velocity, broad-absorption line features seen in a small fraction of quasar spectra has been the subject of debate since their discovery. This has been especially compounded by…
We review the evidence for substructures from the anomalous flux ratios in gravitational lenses. Using high-resolution numerical simulations, we show that at typical image positions, the fraction of surface mass density in substructures is…
Using a high resolution radio image, we successfully resolve the two fold image components B and C of the quasar lens system SDSS J1029+2623. The flux anomalies associated with these two components in the optical regime persist, albeit less…
Weak gravitational lensing of distant galaxies can probe the total projected mass distribution of foreground gravitational structures on all scales and has been used successfully to map the projected mass distribution of rich intermediate…
In the standard structure formation scenario based on the cold dark matter paradigm, galactic halos are predicted to contain a large population of dark matter subhalos. While the most massive members of the subhalo population can appear as…
In modern hierarchical theories of structure formation, rich clusters of galaxies form at the vertices of a weblike distribution of matter, with filaments emanating from them to large distances and with smaller objects forming and draining…
Strong lens time delays have been widely used in cosmological studies, especially to infer $H_0$. The upcoming LSST will provide several hundred well measured time delays from the light curves of lensed quasars. However, due to the…
Sub-parsec binary massive black holes (BBHs) are long anticipated to exist in many QSOs but remain observationally elusive. In this paper, we propose a novel method to probe sub-parsec BBHs through microlensing of lensed QSOs. If a QSO…
Most gravitational lens systems consist of two or four observable images. The absence of detectable odd images allows us to place a lower limit on the power-law slope of the inner mass profile of lensing galaxies. Using a sample of six…
We have worked out simple analytical formulae that accurately approximate the relationship between the position of the source with respect to the lens center and the amplification of the images, hence the lens cross section, for realistic…
The possibility to use observations of lensed relativistic jets on very small angular scales to construct proper models of spiral lens galaxies and to independently determine the Hubble constant is considered. On the example of the system…
We study the time variation of the apparent flux of cosmological point sources due to the transient weak lensing by dark matter microhaloes. Assuming a transverse motion of microhaloes with respect to our line of sight, we derive the…
Our understanding of supercooled liquids and glasses has lagged significantly behind that of simple liquids and crystalline solids. This is in part due to the many possibly relevant degrees of freedom that are present due to the disorder…
This conference shows the impressive rate of advances in the observations and theoretical interpretations of large-scale structure. But to explain my feeling that we may still have a lot to learn I offer some comments on our sociology,…
Many gravitationally lensed quasars exhibit flux ratio "anomalies" that cannot be explained under the hypothesis that the lensing potential is smooth on scales smaller than one kpc. Micro-lensing by stars is a natural source of granularity…
(abridged) Some difficulties in determining the physical properties that lead to observed anomalies in microlensing light curves, such as the mass and separation of extra-solar planets orbiting the lens star, or the relative source-lens…
While the direct detection of the dark-matter particle remains very challenging, the nature of dark matter could be possibly constrained by comparing the observed abundance and properties of small-scale sub-galactic mass structures with…
Analysing the weak lensing distortions of the images of faint background galaxies provides a means to constrain the average mass distribution of cluster galaxies and potentially to test the extent of their dark matter haloes as a function…
The detection of microlensing has opened the way for the development of new methods in galactic astronomy. This series of papers investigates what microlensing can teach us about the structure and shape of the dark halo. In this paper we…