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Gravitational Lensing by Cosmic Strings in the Era of Wide-Field Surveys

Dragan Huterer, Tanmay Vachaspati

astro-pharXiv:astro-ph/0305006

Abstract

Motivated by the recent claim for gravitational lensing by a cosmic string, we reinvestigate the probability of finding such an event with upcoming wide-field surveys. If an observed lensing event is suspected to be due to a string, observations of the vicinity of the event in a circle of diameter L centered on the observed lens should reveal several additional lensing events. For a string located nearby (z 0.5), we find that observations in a region of size ≈ 1 arcmin2 will see 100 objects, of which 5 would be lensed by the string, compared to 0.1 lensed by conventional sources.

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