Related papers: Caustic Crossings in Quasar Light Curves?
The four bright images of the gravitationally lensed quasar Q2237+0305 are being monitored from the ground (eg. OGLE collaboration, Apache Point Observatory) in the hope of observing a high magnification event (HME). Over the past three…
We investigate the spectro-photometric variability of quasars due to lensing of small mass substructure (from several tens to several hundreds solar masses). The aim of this paper is to explore the milli/microlensing influence on the flux…
Gravitational microlensing has proven to be a powerful probe of both the structure at the heart of quasars and the mass function of compact objects in foreground lenses. This paper examines the potential of gravitational microlensing in…
A galaxy cluster acts as a cosmic telescope over background galaxies but also as a cosmic microscope of the lens imperfections. The diverging magnification of lensing caustics enhances the microlensing effect of substructure present within…
Studies of the lensed quasar ${\rm Q}0957+561 {\rm A,B}$ have shown evidence for microlensing in the brightness history of the quasar images. It had been suggested that a frequency offset between the brightness fluctuations in each of the…
We consider microlensing of an elliptical source crossing a fold caustic. We derive a simple expression for the light curve of a source with uniform surface brightness that is accurate to third order in the ellipticity e (yielding errors of…
We investigate the properties of microlensing events caused by planetary systems where planets with a moon are widely separated from their host stars. From this investigation, we find that the moon feature generally appears as an very…
The flux-ratio anomalies observed in multiply-lensed quasar images are most plausibly explained as the result of perturbing structures superposed on the underlying smooth matter distribution of the primary lens. The cold dark matter…
The theoretically expected amplitude of the associations of background quasars with foreground galaxies as a result of gravitational lensing has been updated in this paper. Since the galactic matter alone yields an amplitude of quasar…
Recent studies have shown that line profile distortions are commonly observed in gravitationally lensed quasar spectra. We investigate the effect of gravitational microlensing on quasar broad emission line profiles and their underlying…
Massive structures, such as galaxies, act as strong gravitational lenses on background sources. When the background source is a quasar, several lensed images are seen, as magnified or de-magnified versions of the same object. The detailed…
The light curves observed in microlensing events due to binary lenses span an extremely wide variety of forms, characterised by U-shaped caustic crossings and/or additional smoother peaks. However, all peaks of the binary-lens light curve…
We use the statistics of caustic crossings induced by microlensing in the lens system Q~2237+0305 to study the lens galaxy peculiar velocity. We calculate the caustic crossing rates for a comprehensive family of stellar mass functions and…
Individual stars located near the caustics of galaxy clusters can undergo extreme magnification when crossing micro-caustics, rendering them observable even at cosmological distances. Though most massive stars are likely reside in binary…
Microlensing perturbations to the magnification of gravitationally lensed quasar images are dependent on the angular size of the quasar. If quasar variability at visible wavelengths is caused by a change in the area of the accretion disk,…
Gravitational microlensing by the stellar population of lensing galaxies provides an important opportunity to spatially resolve the accretion disk structure in strongly lensed quasars. Some of the objects (like Einstein's cross) are…
We study the local behavior of gravitational lensing near fold catastrophes. Using a generic form for the lensing map near a fold, we determine the observable properties of the lensed images, focusing on the case when the individual images…
We use semi-analytic modeling on top of the Millennium simulation to study the joint formation of galaxies and their embedded supermassive black holes. Our goal is to test scenarios in which black hole accretion and quasar activity are…
Here, we revisit the polarization signal in caustic-crossing binary microlensing and introduce the maps of the polarization signals of the source star as a function of its position projected on the lens plane. The behavior of these maps…
The luminosity variation of a stellar source due to the gravitational microlensing effect can be considered also if the light rays are defocused (instead of focused) toward the observer. In this case, we should detect a gap instead of a…