Related papers: Comparative Studies of Lensing Methods
In recent years, breakthroughs in methods and data have enabled gravitational time delays to emerge as a very powerful tool to measure the Hubble constant $H_0$. However, published state-of-the-art analyses require of order 1 year of expert…
Gravitational time delays, observed in strong lens systems where the variable background source is multiply-imaged by a massive galaxy in the foreground, provide direct measurements of cosmological distance that are very complementary to…
The study of strong-lensing systems conventionally involves constructing a mass distribution that can reproduce the observed multiply-imaging properties. Such mass reconstructions are generically non-unique. Here, we present an alternative…
Keeping the exact general relativistic treatment of light bending as a reference, we compare the accuracy of commonly used approximate lens equations. We conclude that the best approximate lens equation is the Ohanian lens equation, for…
Large scale imaging surveys will increase the number of galaxy-scale strong lensing candidates by maybe three orders of magnitudes beyond the number known today. Finding these rare objects will require picking them out of at least tens of…
If an extended source, such as a galaxy, is gravitationally lensed by a massive object in the foreground, the lensing distorts the observed image. It is straightforward to simulate what the observed image would be for a particular lens and…
We have previously reported the discovery of strong gravitational lensing by faint elliptical galaxies using the WFPC2 on HST and here we investigate their potential usefulness in putting constraints on lens mass models. We compare various…
Time delays between lensed multiple images have been known to provide an interesting probe of the Hubble constant, but such application is often limited by degeneracies with the shape of lens potentials. We propose a new statistical…
Recently, there have been two landmark discoveries of gravitationally lensed supernovae: the first multiply-imaged SN, "Refsdal", and the first Type Ia SN resolved into multiple images, SN iPTF16geu. Fitting the multiple light curves of…
We study gravitational lens time delays for a general family of lensing potentials, which includes the popular singular isothermal elliptical potential and singular isothermal elliptical density distribution but allows general angular…
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…
Gravitational lens models, some of which might act as if a concave lens, have been recently investigated by using a static and spherically symmetric modified spacetime metric that depends on the inverse distance to the $n$-th power…
The observables in a strong gravitational lens are usually just the image positions and sometimes the flux ratios. We develop a new and simple algorithm which allows a set of models to be fitted exactly to the observations. Taking our cue…
Strong gravitational lenses are unique cosmological probes. These produce multiple images of a single source. Whether a single galaxy, a group or a cluster, extracting cosmologically relevant information requires an accurate modeling of the…
The light we observe from distant astrophysical objects including supernovae and quasars allows us to determine large distances in terms of a cosmological model. Despite the success of the standard cosmological model in fitting the data,…
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…
Like light, gravitational waves can be gravitationally lensed by massive astrophysical objects. Strong gravitational lensing by galaxies and galaxy clusters is anticipated to become observable in the coming years. This phenomenon will…
Gravitational lensing allows us to probe the structure of matter on a broad range of astronomical scales, and as light from a distant source traverses an intervening galaxy, compact matter such as planets, stars, and black holes act as…
(abridged) Gravitationally lensed quasars can be used as powerful cosmological and astrophysical probes. We can (i) infer the Hubble constant based on the time-delay technique, (ii) unveil substructures along the l.o.s. toward distant…
We examine the ability of gravitational lens time delays to reveal complex structure in lens potentials. In Congdon, Keeton & Nordgren (2008), we predicted how the time delay between the bright pair of images in a "fold" lens scales with…