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    Gravitational lensing in astronomy
    (Berlin : Springer, 1998) Wambsganss, J.
    Deflection of light by gravity was predicted by General Relativity and observationally confirmed in 1919. In the following decades, various aspects of the gravitational lens effect were explored theoretically. Among them were: the possibility of multiple or ring-like images of background sources, the use of lensing as a gravitational telescope on very faint and distant objects, and the possibility of determining Hubble's constant with lensing. It is only relatively recently, (after the discovery of the first doubly imaged quasar in 1979), that gravitational lensing has became an observational science. Today lensing is a booming part of astrophysics. In addition to multiply-imaged quasars, a number of other aspects of lensing have been discovered: For example, giant luminous arcs, quasar microlensing, Einstein rings, galactic microlensing events, arclets, and weak gravitational lensing. At present, literally hundreds of individual gravitational lens phenomena are known. Although still in its childhood, lensing has established itself as a very useful astrophysical tool with some remarkable successes. It has contributed significant new results in areas as different as the cosmological distance scale, the large scale matter distribution in the universe, mass and mass distribution of galaxy clusters, the physics of quasars, dark matter in galaxy halos, and galaxy structure. Looking at these successes in the recent past we predict an even more luminous future for gravitational lensing.
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    Erratum: "The Longest Delay: A 14.5 yr Campaign to Determine the Third Time Delay in the Lensing Cluster SDSS J1004+4112" (2022, ApJ, 937, 34)
    (London : Institute of Physics Publ., 2022) Muñoz, J.A.; Kochanek, C.S.; Fohlmeister, J.; Wambsganss, J.; Falco, E.; Forés-Toribio, R.
    [no abstract available]
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    The Longest Delay: A 14.5 yr Campaign to Determine the Third Time Delay in the Lensing Cluster SDSS J1004+4112
    (London : Institute of Physics Publ., 2022) Muñoz, J.A.; Kochanek, C.S.; Fohlmeister, J.; Wambsganss, J.; Falco, E.; Forés-Toribio, R.
    We present new light curves for the four bright images of the five image cluster-lensed quasar gravitational lens system SDSS J1004+4112. The light curves span 14.5 yr and allow the measurement of the time delay between the trailing bright quasar image D and the leading image C. When we fit all four light curves simultaneously and combine the models using the Bayesian information criterion, we find a time delay of Δt DC = 2458.47 ± 1.02 days (6.73 yr), the longest ever measured for a gravitational lens. For the other two independent time delays we obtain Δt BC = 782.20 ± 0.43 days (2.14 yr) and Δt AC = 825.23 ± 0.46 days (2.26 yr), in agreement with previous results. The information criterion is needed to weight the results for light curve models with different polynomial orders for the intrinsic variability and the effects of differential microlensing. The results using the Akaike information criterion are slightly different, but, in practice, the absolute delay errors are all dominated by the ∼4% cosmic variance in the delays rather than the statistical or systematic measurement uncertainties. Despite the lens being a cluster, the quasar images show slow differential variability due to microlensing at the level of a few tenths of a magnitude.