No Arabic abstract
We review results from our monitoring observations of several lensed quasars performed in the optical, UV, and X-ray bands. Modeling of the multi-wavelength light curves provides constraints on the extent of the optical, UV, and X-ray emission regions. One of the important results of our analysis is that the optical sizes as inferred from the microlensing analysis are significantly larger than those predicted by the theoretical-thin-disk estimate. In a few cases we also constrain the slope of the size-wavelength relation. Our size constraints of the soft and hard X-ray emission regions of quasars indicate that in some objects of our sample the hard X-ray emission region is more compact than the soft and in others the soft emission region is smaller. This difference may be the result of the relative strengths of the disk-reflected (harder and extended) versus corona-direct (softer and compact) components in the quasars of our sample. Finally, we present the analysis of several strong microlensing events where we detect an evolution of the relativistic Fe line profile as the magnification caustic traverses the accretion disk. These caustic crossings are used to provide constraints on the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) radius and the accretion disk inclination angle of the black hole in quasar RX J1131-1231.
Observationally, there are a small fraction GRBs prompt emission observed by Fermi/GBM that are composed of two pulses. Occasionally, the cosmological distance of GRB may be lensed when a high mass astrophysical object reside in path between GRB source and observer. In this paper, we are lucky to find out GRB 200716C with two-pulse emission which duration is a few seconds. We present a Bayesian analysis identifying gravitational lensing in both temporal and spectral properties, and calculate the time decay ($Delta tsim 1.92$ s) and magnification ($gammasim 1.5$) between those two pulses based on the temporal fits. One can roughly estimate the lens mass is about $2.38times 10^{5}~M_{odot}$ in the rest frame. If the first pulse of this GRB near triggered time is indeed gravitationally echoed by a second pulse, GRB 200716C may be a short GRB candidate with extended emission.
Superluminous supernovae have been proposed to arise from Population III progenitors that explode as pair-instability supernovae. Pop III stars are the first generation of stars in the Universe, and are thought to form as late as $z sim 6$. Future near-infrared imaging facilities such as ULTIMATE-Subaru can potentially detect and identify these PISNe with a dedicated survey. Gravitational lensing by intervening structure in the Universe can aid in the detection of these rare objects by magnifying the high-$z$ source population into detectability. We perform a mock survey with ULTIMATE-Subaru, taking into account lensing by line-of-sight structure to evaluate its impact on the predicted detection rate. We compare a LOS mass reconstruction using observational data from the Hyper Suprime Cam survey to results from cosmological simulations to test their consistency in calculating the magnification distribution in the Universe to high-$z$, but find that the data-based method is still limited by an inability to accurately characterize structure beyond $z sim1.2$. We also evaluate a survey strategy of targeting massive galaxy clusters to take advantage of their large areas of high magnification. We find that targeting clusters can result in a gain of a factor of $sim$two in the predicted number of detected PISNe at $z > 5$, and even higher gains with increasing redshift, given our assumed survey parameters. For the highest-redshift sources at $z sim 7-9$, blank field surveys will not detect any sources, and lensing magnification by massive clusters will be necessary to observe this population.
Current X-ray observations and simulations show that gravitational lensing can be used to infer the structure near the event horizons of black holes, constrain the dynamics and evolution of black-hole accretion and outflows, test general relativity in the strong-gravity regime and place constraints on the evolution of dark matter in the lensing galaxies. These science goals currently cannot be achieved in a statistically large sample of z = 0.5 - 5 lensed quasars due to the limited capabilities of current X-ray telescopes and the relatively low number (~200) of known lensed quasars. The latter limitation will be resolved with the multi-band and wide-field photometric optical survey of LSST that is expected to lead to the discovery of > 4,000 additional gravitationally lensed systems. As we show in this white paper, these science goals can be reached with an X-ray telescope having a spatial resolution of <0.5arcsec to resolve the lensed images and a collecting area of >0.5 m^2 at 1 keV.
The recent detection of gravitational waves (GWs) and electromagnetic (EM) waves originating from the same source marks the start of a new multi-messenger era in astronomy. The arrival time difference between the GW and EM signal can be used to constrain differences in their propagation speed, and thus gravitational theories. We study to what extent a non-zero time delay can be explained by gravitational lensing when the line of sight to the source passes near a massive object. For galaxy scale lenses, this delay becomes relevant for GWs with frequencies between $10^{-6}$ and $10^{-9}$ Hz, sourced by super massive binary black-holes. In addition to GWs detectable by Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs), we expect to find also a unique and recognizable EM signal. We show that the delay between the GW and EM signal can be of the order of days to months; within reach of future observations. The effect may become important in future multi-messenger astronomy probing of gravitational propagation and interactions.
When gravitational waves pass near massive astrophysical objects, they can be gravitationally lensed. The lensing can split them into multiple wave-fronts, magnify them, or imprint beating patterns on the waves. Here we focus on the multiple images produced by strong lensing. In particular, we investigate strong lensing forecasts, the rate of lensing, and the role of lensing statistics in strong lensing searches. Overall, we find a reasonable rate of lensed detections for double, triple, and quadruple images at the LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA design sensitivity. We also report the rates for A+ and LIGO Voyager and briefly comment on potential improvements due to the inclusion of sub-threshold triggers. We find that most galaxy-lensed events originate from redshifts $z sim 1-4$ and report the expected distribution of lensing parameters for the observed events. Besides forecasts, we investigate the role of lensing forecasts in strong lensing searches, which explore repeated event pairs. One problem associated with the searches is the rising number of event pairs, which leads to a rapidly increasing false alarm probability. We show how knowledge of the expected galaxy lensing time delays in our searches allow us to tackle this problem. Once the time delays are included, the false alarm probability increases linearly (similar to non-lensed searches) instead of quadratically with time, significantly improving the search. For galaxy cluster lenses, the improvement is less significant. The main uncertainty associated with these forecasts are the merger-rate density estimates at high redshift, which may be better resolved in the future.