Related papers: Line Caustic Microlensing and Limb Darkening
The idea that dark matter in the form of small compact bodies (most plausibly planetary mass primordial black holes) betrays its presence by the microlensing of quasars, has been stimulated by statistical studies of quasar light curves and…
Current microlensing follow-up observations focus on high-magnification events because of the high efficiency of planet detection. However, central perturbations of high-magnification events caused by a planet can also be produced by a very…
Observations of clusters of galaxies that gravitationally lens faint background galaxies can probe the amount and the equation of state, $\5$, of the dark energy (quintessence) in the universe. Provided that the mass profile and the mass…
Microlensing of gravitationally lensed quasars by the stars in the foreground lens galaxy can be used to probe the nature of dark matter, to determine the mean stellar mass in the lens galaxy, and to measure the internal structure of quasar…
Microlensing by stars within distant galaxies acting as strong gravitational lenses of multiply-imaged quasars, provides a unique and direct measurement of the internal structure of the lensed quasar on nano-arcsecond scales. The…
It is shown that the linear approximation of the central caustic for the planetary ($q\ll1$) microlensing is valid if $|1-s|\gg q^{1/3}$ (where $q$ is the mass ratio and $s$ is the projected separation in the unit of the Einstein ring…
We compute the emergent stellar spectra from the UV to far infrared for different viewing angles using realistic 3D model atmospheres for a large range in stellar parameters to predict the stellar limb darkening. We have computed full 3D…
Cluster mass profiles are tests of models of structure formation. Only two current observational methods of determining the mass profile, gravitational lensing and the caustic technique, are independent of the assumption of dynamical…
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…
Automatic classification of variability is now possible with tools like neural networks. Here, we present two neural networks for the identification of microlensing events -- the first discriminates against variable stars and the second…
Highly magnified stars ($\mu$ $>$ 100) are now outinely identified as transient events at cosmological distances thanks to microlensing by intra-cluster stars near the critical curves of galaxy clusters. Using the {\it James Webb} Space…
We investigate the distortions due to this shear in the microlensing light curves and in the astrometric microlensing centroid shift trajectories. As expected, the light curve deviation increases as the shear increases and the impact…
When a microlensing light curve is contaminated by blended light from unresolved stars near the line of sight to the lensed star, the light curve shape and corresponding parameterization for the event will differ from the values expected…
A major problem in the interpretation of microlensing events is that the only measured quantity, the Einstein time scale t_E, is a degenerate combination of the three quantities one would like to know, the mass, distance, and speed of the…
Extensive simulations of planetary microlensing are necessary both before and after a survey is conducted: before to design and optimize the survey and after to understand its detection efficiency. The major bottleneck in such computations…
The light curve of an exoplanetary transit can be used to estimate the planetary radius and other parameters of interest. Because accurate parameter estimation is a non-analytic and computationally intensive problem, it is often useful to…
The passage of stars through the beam of a lensed quasar can induce violent fluctuations in its apparent brightness. The fluctuations observed in the Huchra lens, (2237+0305), are taken to be the first evidence of this ``microlensing''…
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…
Microlensing of stars in our Galaxy has long been used to detect and characterize stellar populations, exoplanets, brown dwarfs, stellar remnants and whatever objects may magnify the source stars with their gravitational fields. The…
We present an analysis of the microlensing event OGLE-2015-BLG-0232. This event is challenging to characterize for two reasons. First, the light curve is not well sampled during the caustic crossing due to the proximity of the full Moon…