Sharif Digital Repository

The Galactic bulge source MOA-2010-BLG-523S exhibited short-term deviations from a standard microlensing light curve near the peak of an A max ∼ 265 high-magnification microlensing event. The deviations originally seemed consistent with expectations for a planetary companion to the principal lens. We combine long-term photometric monitoring with a previously published high-resolution spectrum taken near peak to demonstrate that this is an RS CVn variable, so that planetary microlensing is not required to explain the light-curve deviations. This is the first spectroscopically confirmed RS CVn star discovered in the Galactic bulge  

In this paper, we propose a new strategy for the pixel-lensing observations of M87 in the Virgo cluster using theHubble Space Telescope(HST). In contrast to a previous observational strategy by Baltz et al., we show that a few days of intensive observations with the duration of ~90 min in eachHSTorbit will increase the observational efficiency of high-magnification events by more than one order of magnitude. We perform a Monte Carlo simulation for this strategy and we show that the number of high-magnification microlensing events will increase at the rate of 4.2 events per day with a typical transit time-scale of 16 h. We also examine the possibility of observing mini-halo dark matter... 

Detecting compact objects such as black holes, white dwarfs, strange (quark) stars and neutron stars by means of their gravitational lensing effect on an observed companion in a binary system has already been suggested almost four decades ago. However, these predictions were made even before the first observations of gravitational lensing, whereas nowadays gravitational microlensing surveys towards the Galactic bulge yield almost 1000 events per year where one star magnifies the light of a more distant one. With a specific view to those experiments, we therefore carry out simulations to assess the prospects for detection of the transient periodic magnification of the companion star, which... 

We investigate whether or not Gaia can specify the binary fractions of massive stellar populations in the Galactic disk through astrometric microlensing. Furthermore, we study whether or not some information about their mass distributions can be inferred via this method. In this regard, we simulate the binary astrometric microlensing events due to massive stellar populations according to the Gaia observing strategy by considering (i) stellar-mass black holes, (ii) neutron stars, (iii) white dwarfs, and (iv) main-sequence stars as microlenses. The Gaia efficiency for detecting the binary signatures in binary astrometric microlensing events is ∼10%-20%. By calculating the optical depth due to... 

We present microlens parallax measurements for 21 (apparently) isolated lenses observed toward the Galactic bulge that were imaged simultaneously from Earth and Spitzer, which was ∼1 AU west of Earth in projection. We combine these measurements with a kinematic model of the Galaxy to derive distance estimates for each lens, with error bars that are small compared to the Sun's galactocentric distance. The ensemble therefore yields a well-defined cumulative distribution of lens distances. In principle, it is possible to compare this distribution against a set of planets detected in the same experiment in order to measure the Galactic distribution of planets. Since these Spitzer observations... 

Microlensing events provide a unique capacity to study the stellar remnant population of the Galaxy. Optical microlensing suffers from a near-complete degeneracy between mass, velocity, and distance. However, a subpopulation of lensed stars, Mira variable stars, are also radio-bright, exhibiting strong SiO masers. These are sufficiently bright and compact to permit direct imaging using existing very long baseline interferometers such as the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). We show that these events are relatively common, occurring at a rate of ≈2 yr-1 of which 0.1 yr-1 are associated with Galactic black holes. Features in the associated images, e.g., the Einstein ring, are sufficiently well... 

Simultaneous observations of microlensing events from multiple locations allow for the breaking of degeneracies between the physical properties of the lensing system, specifically by exploring different regions of the lens plane and by directly measuring the "microlens parallax." We report the discovery of a 30-65M J brown dwarf orbiting a K dwarf in the microlensing event OGLE-2015-BLG-1319. The system is located at a distance of ∼5 kpc toward the Galactic Bulge. The event was observed by several ground-based groups as well as by Spitzer and Swift, allowing a measurement of the physical properties. However, the event is still subject to an eight-fold degeneracy, in particular the well-known... 

We report on the mass and distance measurements of two single-lens events from the 2015 Spitzer microlensing campaign. With both finite-source effect and microlens parallax measurements, we find that the lens of OGLE-2015-BLG-1268 is very likely a brown dwarf (BD). Assuming that the source star lies behind the same amount of dust as the Bulge red clump, we find the lens is a 45 ±7 BD at 5.9 ±1.0 kpc. The lens of of the second event, OGLE-2015-BLG-0763, is a 0.50 ±0.04 star at 6.9 ±1.0 kpc. We show that the probability to definitively measure the mass of isolated microlenses is dramatically increased once simultaneous ground- and space-based observations are conducted  

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation lensing is a promising tool to study the physics of early universe. In this work we probe the imprints of deviations from isotropy and scale invariance of primordial curvature perturbation power spectrum on CMB lensing potential and convergence. Specifically, we consider a scale-dependent hemispherical asymmetry in primordial power spectrum. We show that the CMB lensing potential and convergence and also the cross-correlation of the CMB lensing and late time galaxy convergence can probe the amplitude and the scale dependence of the dipole modulation. As another example, we consider a primordial power spectrum with local feature. We show that... 

The standard model of cosmology with nearly Gaussian, isotropic, scale invariant and adiabatic initial conditions describes the cosmological observations well. However, the study of any deviation from the mentioned conditions will open up a new horizon to the physics of early universe. In this work, we study the effect of the oscillatory and step-like features in potentials of inflationary models in late time large scale structure observations. Mainly we study the matter power spectrum, number density of the structures, dark matter halo bias and specifically CMB lensing. We show that the oscillatory models can introduce some degeneracy with late time effects on BAO scale. We also conclude... 

We investigate gravitational lensing in the context of the MOG modified theory of gravity. Using a formulation of the theory with no adjustable or fitted parameters, we present the MOG equations of motion for slow, nonrelativistic test particles and for ultrarelativistic test particles, such as rays of light. We demonstrate how the MOG prediction for the bending of light can be applied to astronomical observations. Our investigation first focuses on a small set of strong lensing observations where the properties of the lensing objects are found to be consistent with the predictions of the theory. We also present an analysis of the colliding clusters 1E0657-558 (known also as the Bullet... 

One of the important and famous topics in general theory of relativity and gravitation is the problem of geodesic deviation and its related singularity theorems. An interesting subject is the investigation of these concepts when quantum effects are considered. Since the definition of trajectory is not possible in the framework of standard quantum mechanics (SQM), we investigate the problem of geodesic equation and its related topics in the framework of Bohmian quantum mechanics in which the definition of trajectory is possible. We do this in a fixed background and we do not consider the backreaction effects of matter on the space-time metric. © 2018 World Scientific Publishing Company  

We present the analysis of stellar binary microlensing event OGLE-2015-BLG-0060 based on observations obtained from 13 different telescopes. Intensive coverage of the anomalous parts of the light curve was achieved by automated follow-up observations from the robotic telescopes of the Las Cumbres Observatory. We show that, for the first time, all main features of an anomalous microlensing event are well covered by follow-up data, allowing us to estimate the physical parameters of the lens. The strong detection of second-order effects in the event light curve necessitates the inclusion of longer-baseline survey data in order to constrain the parallax vector. We find that the event was most... 

In this paper, we analyze the variation of the gravitational action on a bounded region of spacetime whose boundary contains segments with various characters, including null. We develop a systematic approach to decompose the derivative of metric variations into orthogonal and tangential components with respect to the boundary and express them in terms of variations of geometric objects associated with the boundary hypersurface. We suggest that a double-foliation of spacetime provides a natural and useful set-up for treating the general problem and clarifies the assumptions and results in specialized ones. In this set-up, we are able to obtain the boundary action necessary for the variational... 

We present an analysis of potential follow-up polarimetric microlensing observations to study the stellar atmospheres of distant stars. First, we produce synthetic microlensing events using the Galactic model, stellar population and interstellar dust toward the Galactic bulge. We simulate the polarization microlensing light curves and pass them through the instrument specifications of the FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph (FORS2) polarimeter at the Very Large Telescope (VLT), and then analyse them.We find that the accuracy of the VLT allows us to constrain the atmospheres of cool red giant branch (RGB) stars. Assuming that about 3000 microlensing events are detected per year by... 

In this paper, we study a particular deformation of the Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity recently considered by Maxfield, Turiaci, and independently by Witten. We will compute the partition function of this model as well as its higher order correlators to all orders in genus expansion in the low temperature limit for small perturbations. In this limit, the results match with those obtained from the Airy limit of a Hermitian random matrix ensemble. Using this result, we will also study the free energy of the model. One observes that although the annealed free energy has pathological behaviors, under certain assumptions, the quenched free energy evaluated by replica trick exhibits the desired... 

We study the possibility of magnetic mass detection using the gravitational microlensing technique. Recently, the theoretical effect of magnetic mass in NUT space on the microlensing light curve has been studied. It has been shown that in the low photometric signal-to-noise ratio and sampling rate of MACHO experiment light curves, no signature of the NUT factor has been found. In order to increase the sensitivity of magnetic mass detection, we propose a systematic search for microlensing events, using the currently running alert systems and complementary telescopes for monitoring Large Magellanic Clouds stars. This observation strategy provides the lowest observable limit of the NUT factor,... 

We study the theoretical signature of magnetic masses on the light curve of the gravitational microlensing effect in NUT space. The light curves for microlensing events in NUT space are presented and contrasted with those caused by lensing produced by normal matter. In the next step, associating the magnetic mass to the massive astrophysical compact halo objects (MACHOs), we try to see the effect on the light curves of microlensing candidates observed by the MACHO group. The presence or absence of this feature in the observed microlensing events can shed light on the question of the existence of magnetic masses in the Universe  

In this work, we use 13 microlensing candidates with dark lenses from OGLE III catalogue [L. Wyrzykowski et al., Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 458 (2016) 3012.] and cross-match them with the GAIA catalogue. We identify the microlensing source stars in the GAIA catalogue by comparing the coordinate and the magnitude of stars and using the proper motion and the parallax parameters of the source stars. Combining with the microlensing light curves as well as the microlensing parallax effect, we determine the mass and the distance of lenses from Earth. We conclude that the lens for this set of microlensing events for the massive lenses are black hole and for the small lenses are neutron/white dwarf...