Gravitational Lensing and Microlensing

S. MOLLERACH Y E. ROULET

World Scientific

Lugar: Singapur; Año: 2002 p. 189

981-02-4852-0

For many decades gravitational lensing appeared to be just a curiosityassociated to the deflection of light predicted by GeneralRelativity. However, in the last twenty years a wide range of lensingphenomena have been discovered, establishing gravitational lensing asone of the most important areas of research in observationalastronomy. The activity in this field has been growing at a steadyrate, attracting both astrophysicist and cosmologists due to the majorimplications that these results can have for our understanding of theUniverse.  The beautiful lensing phenomena can indeed provide crucialinformation about the geometry of the Universe, its expansion rate andmatter content, on the formation of the large scale structures andtheir distribution at different scales and on the nature of the dark matter. The microlensingsearches provide also the possibility to look for non-luminous stellarobjects (black holes, neutron stars, faint white dwarfs, browndwarfs), testing if they are of any relevance to explain part of the dark matter,  and even to search for planets orbiting distant stars.The aim of this book is to provide a self contained pedagogicalpresentation of the various aspects of gravitational lensing. We hopethat this will be useful both to the graduate students and to theresearchers interested in this field. It may also be appropriate for aset of lectures on the subject or as part of a more general course onCosmology.