Directory of Gravitational Lensing Resources

Home > Science > Physics > Relativity > Gravitational Lensing

Sites and pages with material about the astronomical applications of the gravitational deflection of light predicted by general relativity: from the multiple and distorted images produced when the light of distant astronomical objects is deflected by the masses of less distant galaxies or other astronomical bodies, astronomers and cosmologists can extract information about the lensing system, the distant source, or even the cosmos as a whole.

Resources in This Category

• Gravitational Lens Data Base

  http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/castles/
  Homepage of CASTLEs, a gravitational lensing survey based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The main feature is a data base, complete with images, of all gravitational lens candidates that astronomers have identified so far.

• Gravitational Lenses

  http://vela.astro.ulg.ac.be/themes/extragal/gravlens/bibdat/engl/grav_lens.html
  Site hosted by the Université de Liège; features a bibliography, a list of lensing candidates, and descriptions of didactical experiments (involving glass lenses) useful for a better understanding of the phenomenon.

• Gravitational Lensing from a Spacetime Perspective

  http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-2004-9/index.html
  Article by Volker Perlick (Technical University, Berlin) published in Living Reviews in Relativity about gravitational lensing in curved spacetime (as opposed to descriptions that rely on slight relativistic deviations from the Newtonian-Euclidean description of gravity and space).

• Gravitational Lensing in Astronomy

  http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-1998-12/
  Review article by Joachim Wambsganss, published in Living Reviews in Relativity. Provides a brief history of gravitational lensing, an overview of the basic physics and of the variety of lensing phenomena, and an outlook on future research.

• Gravitational Lensing with Wineglasses

  http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~pjm/lensing/wineglasses/
  Explains how gravitational lensing can be simulated using wine glasses as (unusually-shaped) glass lenses. Includes images and diagrams to explain the different phenomena gravitational lensing can produce. By Phil Marshall (Stanford University).

• HubbleSite News Center: Gravitational Lenses

  http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/exotic/gravitational-lens/
  List of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of Gravitational Lenses (including the famous Einstein Cross picture); updated continually.

• Lectures on Gravitational Lensing

  http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9606001
  Lecture notes by Ramesh Narayan (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Matthias Bartelmann (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy) about the basic concepts and applications of gravitational lensing.

• Strong and Weak Lensing Constraints on Galaxy Mass Distribution

  http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0112123
  Review article by Jean-Paul Kneib about the way that gravitational lensing can be used to infer the mass distribution of galaxies (including the detection of dark matter).

• Weak Gravitational Lensing

  http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9912508
  Article by Matthias Bartelmann and Peter Schneider about the statistical analysis of weak lensing effects that can be used to gain information about the large-scale mass distribution within our Universe.

 

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