Distortion of gamma-ray burst light curves by gravitational microlensing

Abstract

If at cosmological distances, a small fraction of gamma-ray bursts should be multiply imaged by intervening galaxies or clusters, resulting in the appearance of two very similar bursts from the same location with a relative time delay of hours to a year. We show that microlensing by individual stars in the lensing galaxy can smear out the light curves of the multiply imaged bursts on millisecond time scales. Therefore, in deciding whether two bursts are similar enough to qualify as multiple images, one must look at time scales longer than a few tens of milliseconds, since shorter time scales are possibly rendered dissimilar by microlensing.

6 pages when LaTex'ed, with 5 figures included Accepted to MNRAS; replaced version contains psfigure.tex file, since psfig.tex was causing problems (no changes in the text or figures of the paper)

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Strong gravitational lensing of explosive transients
• Evidence for an intermediate-mass black hole from a gravitationally lensed gamma-ray burst
• In search for natural wormholes
• Gravitational microlensing of gamma-ray blazars
• On the Probability of Microlensing in GRB Afterglows
• A search for lensed gamma-ray bursts in 11 years of observations by Fermi GBM
• GRB Spikes Could Resolve Stars
• Imprint of Gravitational Lensing by Population III Stars in Gamma Ray Burst Light Curves
• Gravitational Microlensing Time Delays at High Optical Depth: Image Parities and the Temporal Properties of Fast Radio Bursts
• Nanolensing of gamma-ray bursts
• Gravitational Microlensing of Gamma Ray Bursts at Medium Optical Depth
• Microlensing in phase space I: Continuous propagation of variability moments