Statistics of Extreme Gravitational Lensing Events. II.The Small Shear Case

Abstract

We consider an astrophysical system with a population of sources and a population of lenses. For each pair of source and lens, there is a thin on-axis tube-like volume behind the lens in which the radiation flux from the source is greatly increased due to gravitational lensing. Any objects (such as dust grains) which pass through such a thin tube will experience strong bursts of radiation, i.e., Extreme Gravitational Lensing Events (EGLE). We study the physics and statistics of EGLE for the case in which the shear is larger or comparable to the finite source size. We find that the presence of shear has only a small effect on the EGLE statistics.