Search results for "Gravitational lensing"
showing 10 items of 43 documents
First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. II. Array and Instrumentation
2019
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) array that comprises millimeter- and submillimeter-wavelength telescopes separated by distances comparable to the diameter of the Earth. At a nominal operating wavelength of ~1.3 mm, EHT angular resolution (λ/D) is ~25 μas, which is sufficient to resolve nearby supermassive black hole candidates on spatial and temporal scales that correspond to their event horizons. With this capability, the EHT scientific goals are to probe general relativistic effects in the strong-field regime and to study accretion and relativistic jet formation near the black hole boundary. In this Letter we describe the system design of th…
The Polarized Image of a Synchrotron-emitting Ring of Gas Orbiting a Black Hole
2021
Full list of authors: Narayan, Ramesh; Palumbo, Daniel C. M.; Johnson, Michael D.; Gelles, Zachary; Himwich, Elizabeth; Chang, Dominic O.; Ricarte, Angelo; Dexter, Jason; Gammie, Charles F.; Chael, Andrew A.; Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration; Akiyama, Kazunori; Alberdi, Antxon; Alef, Walter; Algaba, Juan Carlos; Anantua, Richard; Asada, Keiichi; Azulay, Rebecca; Baczko, Anne-Kathrin; Ball, David Baloković, Mislav; Barrett, John; Benson, Bradford A.; Bintley, Dan; Blackburn, Lindy; Blundell, Raymond; Boland, Wilfred; Bouman, Katherine L.; Bower, Geoffrey C.; Boyce, Hope; Bremer, Michael; Brinkerink, Christiaan D.; Brissenden, Roger; Britzen, Silke; Broderick, Avery E.; Broguiere, Domini…
Femtolensing by dark matter revisited
2018
Femtolensing of gamma ray bursts (GRBs) has been put forward as an exciting possibility to probe exotic astrophysical objects with masses below $10^{-13}$ solar masses such as small primordial black holes or ultra-compact dark matter minihalos, made up for instance of QCD axions. In this paper we critically review this idea, properly taking into account the extended nature of the source as well as wave optics effects. We demonstrate that most GRBs are inappropriate for femtolensing searches due to their large sizes. This removes the previous femtolensing bounds on primordial black holes, implying that vast regions of parameter space for primordial black hole dark matter are not robustly con…
Gravitational Lensing: the Structure of Quasars and Galaxies
2016
We use gravitational lens systems in which a galaxy produces multiple images of a distant quasar to study the properties of both the unresolved structure of the lensed quasar and the mass distribution in the gravitational lens. First, we estimate the size and the logarithmic slope of the temperature profile in the accretion disk of the lensed quasar Q2237+0305 using a method that is independent of the component velocities, based on six epochs of multi-wavelength narrowband images from the Nordic Optical Telescope. A statistical comparison of the observed microlensing with simulations based on microlensing magnification maps gives Bayesian estimates for the half-light radius of ~8 light-days…
Microlensing Discovery of a Population of Very Tight, Very Low Mass Binary Brown Dwarfs
2013
Although many models have been proposed, the physical mechanisms responsible for the formation of low-mass brown dwarfs (BDs) are poorly understood. The multiplicity properties and minimum mass of the BD mass function provide critical empirical diagnostics of these mechanisms. We present the discovery via gravitational microlensing of two very low mass, very tight binary systems. These binaries have directly and precisely measured total system masses of 0.025 M [SUB]⊙[/SUB] and 0.034 M [SUB]⊙[/SUB], and projected separations of 0.31 AU and 0.19 AU, making them the lowest-mass and tightest field BD binaries known. The discovery of a population of such binaries indicates that BD binaries can …
CMB Anisotropy Computations Using Hydra Gas Code
2014
From FFP6 to FFP11, we presented the advances in our Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy computations using N-body Hydra Codes. For such computations, codes without baryons were used: First sequential versions and afterwards parallel ones. With both of them we computed the weak lensing and the Rees-Sciama contributions to the CMB angular power spectrum. Using our numerical techniques, we reported a lensing effect higher than that estimated in previous papers (for very small angular scales). Our CMB computations require less interpolations and approximations than other approaches. This could explain part of our excess of power in lensing computations. Our higher time and angular res…
A New Numerical Approach to Estimate the Sunyaev–Zel’dovich Effect
2013
Several years ago, we designed a particular ray tracing method. Combined with a Hydra parallel code (without baryons), it may compute some CMB anisotropies: weak lensing (WL) and Rees–Sciama (RS) effects. Only dark matter is fully necessary to estimate these effects. For very small angular scales, we made an exhaustive study leading to a lensing contribution slightly—but significantly—greater than previous ones. Afterwards, the same ray tracing procedure was included in a parallel Hydra code with baryons. The resulting code was then tested. This code is being currently applied to the study of the thermal and kinetic Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (SZ) contributions to the CMB anisotropies. We present h…
Revealing the structure of the lensed quasar Q 0957+561. I. Accretion disk size
2021
We thank the anonymous referee for the helpful comments, and constructive remarks on this manuscript. We thank the GLENDAMA project for making publicly available the monitoring data of Q 0957+561. C.F. gratefully acknowledges the financial support from Tel Aviv University and University of Haifa through a DFG grant HA3555-14/1. E.M. and J.A.M are supported by the Spanish MINECO with the grants AYA2016- 79104-C3-1-P and AYA2016-79104-C3-3-P. J.A.M. is also supported from the Generalitat Valenciana project of excellence Prometeo/2020/085. J.J.V. is supported by the project AYA2017-84897-P financed by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competividad and by the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regi…
A brown dwarf orbiting an M-dwarf:MOA 2009-BLG-411L
2012
Context. Caustic crossing is the clearest signature of binary lenses in microlensing. In the present context, this signature is diluted by the large source star but a detailed analysis has allowed the companion signal to be extracted.Aims. MOA 2009-BLG-411 was detected on August 5, 2009 by the MOA-Collaboration. Alerted as a high-magnification event, it was sensitive to planets. Suspected anomalies in the light curve were not confirmed by a real-time model, but further analysis revealed small deviations from a single lens extended source fit.Methods. Thanks to observations by all the collaborations, this event was well monitored. We first decided to characterize the source star properties b…
CODEX Weak Lensing Mass Catalogue and implications on the mass-richness relation
2021
The COnstrain Dark Energy with X-ray clusters (CODEX) sample contains the largest flux limited sample of X-ray clusters at $0.35 = \alpha \mu + \beta$, with $\mu = \ln (M_{200c}/M_{\mathrm{piv}})$, and $M_{\mathrm{piv}} = 10^{14.81} M_{\odot}$. We find a slope $\alpha = 0.49^{+0.20}_{-0.15}$, normalization $ \exp(\beta) = 84.0^{+9.2}_{-14.8}$ and $\sigma_{\ln \lambda | \mu} = 0.17^{+0.13}_{-0.09}$ using CFHT richness estimates. In comparison to other weak lensing richness-mass relations, we find the normalization of the richness statistically agreeing with the normalization of other scaling relations from a broad redshift range ($0.0<z<0.65$) and with different cluster selection (X-ray, Sun…