Related papers: Source Size Limitation from Variabilities of a Len…
The lensing of gravitational waves (GWs) occurs when GWs experience local gravitational potential. In the weak lensing regime, it has been reported that a simple consistency relation holds between the variances of the magnification and…
It is well known that measurements of H0 from gravitational lens time delays scale as H0~1-k_E where k_E is the mean convergence at the Einstein radius R_E but that all available lens data other than the delays provide no direct constraints…
We explore the impact of corrections to the propagation on the waveforms of gravitationally lensed gravitational waves under the geometrical optics approximation, focusing on both uniform cosmological modifications and local modifications…
Recently, Chartas et al. (2001) detected a rapid X-ray flare in the gravitationally lensed, multiple image quasar RX J0911.4+0551. Dramatic events, such as rapid X-ray flares, are useful in providing high precision measurements of the time…
Owing to the advent of large area photometric surveys, the possibility to use broad band photometric data, instead of spectra, to measure the size of the broad line region of active galactic nuclei, has raised a large interest. We describe…
Context. Observations of the effect of microlensing in gravitationally lensed quasars could potentially be used to study the structure of the source on distance scales down to the size of the supermassive black hole powering the quasar…
Measuring time delays between the multiple images of gravitationally lensed quasars is now recognized as a competitive way to constrain the cosmological parameters, and it is complementary with other cosmological probes. This requires long…
Robust fast methods to classify variable light curves in large sky surveys are becoming increasingly important. While it is relatively straightforward to identify common periodic stars and particular transient events (supernovae, novae,…
Time delays are a key observable in strong gravitational lensing systems. Their theoretical expression is usually written as a sum of a geometrical delay and a Shapiro delay, with cosmology entering through angular diameter distances and a…
We investigate the time-dependent variations of ultraviolet (UV) black hole mass estimates of quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). From SDSS spectra of 615 high-redshift (1.69 < z < 4.75) quasars with spectra from two epochs, we…
In the very near future, weak lensing surveys will map the projected density of the universe in an unbiased way over large regions of the sky. In order to interpret the results of studies it is helpful to develop an understanding of the…
Recent observations show a population of active galaxies with milliarcseconds offsets between optical and radio emission. Such offsets can be an indication of extreme phenomena associated with supermassive black holes including relativistic…
When the gravitational lensing potential can be approximated by that of circularly symmetric system affected by weak perturbations, it is found that the shape of the resulting (tangential) caustics is entirely specified by the local…
Counter to intuition, the images of an extended galaxy lensed by a moving galaxy cluster should have slightly different spectra in any metric gravity theory. This is mainly for two reasons. One relies on the gravitational potential of a…
We present the first results from a pilot programme to monitor the short term optical variability in Broad Absorption Line system QSOs. Intra-night optical variations of ~5% were detected on time scales of ~ one hour in QSOs 0846+156 and…
In this paper we investigate the relation between the potential and geometric time delays in gravitational lensing. In the original paper of Shapiro (1964), it is stated that there is a time delay in the radar signals between Earth and…
Context. X-ray spectral variability analyses of active galactic nuclei (AGN) with moderate luminosities and redshifts typically show a softer when brighter behaviour. Such a trend has rarely been investigated for high-luminosity AGNs ($…
One might expect light to be scattered when it passes through a gravitational wave, and might hope that in favourable circumstances these scatterings could be observed on Earth even if the interaction occurs far away. Damour and…
While the Hubble constant can be derived from observable time delays between images of lensed quasars, the result is often highly sensitive to assumptions and systematic uncertainties in the lensing model. Unlike most previous authors we…
Quasar spectra have a variety of absorption lines whose origins range from energetic winds expelled from the central engines to unrelated, intergalactic clouds. We present multi-epoch, medium resolution spectra of eight quasars at z~2 that…