Rapid radio variability in PKS 0537-441: superluminal microlensing caused by small masses in a foreground galaxy?

Details Rapid radio variability in PKS 0537-441: superluminal microlensing caused by small masses in a foreground galaxy? Rapid radio variability in PKS 0537-441: superluminal microlensing caused by small masses in a foreground galaxy?

Sep 1995

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1995a%26a...301..641r&link_type=abstract

Astronomy and Astrophysics, v.301, p.641

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

37

Gravitational Lensing, Dark Matter, Bl Lacertae Objects: Individual: Pks 0537-441, Radio Continuum: Galaxies

Scientific paper

The southern blazar PKS 0537-441 has recently displayed very strong intraday variability at 1.42GHz. Flux density variations with amplitudes of ~45% on time scales as short as 10^4^s were registered, implicating brightness temperatures higher than 10^21^K in a straightforward intrinsic interpretation. We suggest and discuss the possibility that this variability have an extrinsic origin based on gravitational microlensing by small compact objects (namely brown dwarfs) in a foreground galaxy. In the proposed model the variability arises when a superluminal emission knot in the jet of the blazar is lensed by objects of the dark halo of the intervening galaxy. For an emission region with a superluminal velocity β_app_~10 in the lens plane, the masses of the lenses are in the 10^-4^-10^-3^Msun_ range. From the event rate we have estimated a dark matter density 0.009<~ρ_o_<~0.043hMsun_/pc^3^ in the center of the foreground galaxy.

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