Group items tagged

An exposition of the phenomenon and uses of quasar microlensing. (I)

A detailed review of strongly lensed quasars, with dual emphasis on gravitational time delays as a tool for cosmology, and on cosmological microlensing. (A)

Introduced a new method to analyze and interpret quasar microlensing light curves. In the process it gave a good description of the physical picture. (A)

Used microlensing to learn about the granularity of the mass distribution in galaxies and therefore infer an absolute measurement of the dark matter and stellar content. This is a beautiful example of single-epoch microlensing applications. (A)

The sources behind Zwicky's proposed lenses would be galaxies and their active nuclei, in the far distant universe; only in the last 30 years have such faint objects been detected in sufficient numbers to reveal the one in a thousand that are multiply-imaged. The first lensed quasar was confirmed in this paper. (A)

The SQLS project was similar to the CLASS survey in that a combination of spectra and imaging was used to make a statistical lens sample, but the data was all taken in the optical and near infrared. (A)

Quiescent galaxies are more numerous sources, but are even fainter than quasars: it would take the advent of CCD imaging cameras to detect the first gravitational arc. It was not clear what the arc was: a deep spectrum revealed it to be a background galaxy, observed at high magnification through the lens. (A)

This paper studies the change in number density of quasars with distance from bright galaxies and models the results as a gravitational lensing signal from the bright galaxies. It includes a discussion of the potential systematic errors in the measurements and why previous attempts at making this measurement were limited by the systematic errors. (A)