2019/12/26 by Giulia Cusin, Ruth Durrer, Cusin, Giulia +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.HE #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1912.11916
37 pages, 18 figures
openalex publication_date 2019/12/26 · arxiv created 2020/06/18 · arxiv updated 2020/06/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper we study gravitational lensing of gravitational wave events. The main point of the present work is to introduce a semi-analytic approach so that each ingredient can be varied and tested individually. Our analytic model for the source population is motivated by a numerical study and we compare semi-analytical and numerical results. We determine the expected magnification for events seen at a given observed luminosity distance. We find that while the probability of significant magnification of the observed LIGO-Virgo events is very small, the probability distribution of the magnification has a significant tail to high μ such that e.g. the variance of the magnification is very large and even diverges in the geometric optics approximation. For the 10 binary black hole mergers observed by LIGO-Virgo in the O1+O2 observation campaigns, the probability that one of them has been magnified with magnification of 5 or bigger is Pobs(>5)∼ 0.01 while the probability of magnification by 50 or bigger is Pobs(>50)∼ 0.005.