Pith. sign in

REVIEW 7 cited by

Stellar-mass microlensing of gravitational waves

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2012.07800 v1 pith:CTSQ3S7F submitted 2020-12-14 astro-ph.HE gr-qc

Stellar-mass microlensing of gravitational waves

classification astro-ph.HE gr-qc
keywords lensesmicrolensinggravitationallensinggalaxystrongwaveswhen
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

When gravitational waves pass through the nuclear star clusters of galactic lenses, they may be microlensed by the stars. Such microlensing can cause potentially observable beating patterns on the waveform due to waveform superposition and magnify the signal. On the one hand, the beating patterns and magnification could lead to the first detection of a microlensed gravitational wave. On the other hand, microlensing introduces a systematic error in strong lensing use-cases, such as localization and cosmography studies. We show that diffraction effects are important when we consider GWs in the LIGO frequency band lensed by objects with masses $\lesssim 100 \, \rm M_\odot$. We also show that the galaxy hosting the microlenses changes the lensing configuration qualitatively, so we cannot treat the microlenses as isolated point mass lenses when strong lensing is involved. We find that for stellar lenses with masses $\sim 1 \, \rm M_\odot$, diffraction effects significantly suppress the microlensing magnification. Thus, our results suggest that gravitational waves lensed by typical galaxy or galaxy cluster lenses may offer a relatively clean environment to study the lens system, free of contamination by stellar lenses. We discuss potential implications for the strong lensing science case. More complicated microlensing configurations will require further study.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Effective description of lensed gravitational waves diffracted by stellar fields

    astro-ph.HE 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Authors synthesize SVD-based reduced-order models from wave-optics simulations to provide an effective stochastic description of stellar microlensing distortions on lensed gravitational waves.

  2. The diffraction-lensing interpretation of GW231123 with astrophysical priors

    astro-ph.CO 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    GW231123 is better fit by a lower-mass merger diffracted by an isolated ~1000 M_sun lens, but astrophysical priors and a frequentist rate estimate make this lensing interpretation unlikely.

  3. Identifying lensed gravitational waves with physics-informed posterior learning

    gr-qc 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Fusing a simulation-trained common-source mass posterior with waveform features raises lensed-event detection efficiency from 20.8% to 35.2% at 1% false-positive rate and lowers the SNR for 50% efficiency from 45.3 to 33.5.

  4. Across the Universe: GW231123 as a magnified and diffracted black hole merger

    astro-ph.GA 2025-12 conditional novelty 6.0

    GW231123's extreme mass and spins may be explained by a point-mass microlens embedded in a galaxy, reducing the inferred source mass to about 100-180 solar masses.

  5. Parameter inference of millilensed gravitational waves using neural spline flows

    gr-qc 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0

    Neural spline flows perform fast posterior inference on 11-dimensional millilensed GW parameters with accuracy comparable to dynesty for most quantities and a 3-day to 0.8-second speedup.

  6. Accelerated inference of microlensed gravitational waves with machine learning

    astro-ph.CO 2025-11 conditional novelty 5.0

    A neural posterior estimator trained on wave-optics-microlensed gravitational-wave signals recovers source and lens parameters and Bayes factors consistent with Bilby, about 10 times faster.

  7. Probing globular clusters parameters through gravitational wave lensing with stellar-mass black hole binaries

    gr-qc 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Simulations of wave-optics lensing of GW150914-like signals by globular clusters recover injected velocity dispersion values for favorable alignments when lens and source parameters are jointly estimated.