Poster Presentation Astronomical Society of Australia Annual Scientific Meeting including HWWS 2013

Adventures in the microlensing cloud: eResearch tools for zooming into the heart of quasars (#272)

Georgios Vernardos 1 , Christopher J Fluke 1
  1. Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Vic, Australia

Cosmological gravitational microlensing is an established technique for exploring the structure of the inner parts of a quasar, especially the accretion disk and the central supermassive black hole. Results from studies on ~20 of the ~90 known lensed systems indicate the presence of a thin disk (Eigenbrod et al.2008, Blackburne et al. 2011, Mediavilla et al.2011), although this is not always the case (Floyd et al. 2009, Morgan et al. 2010). Upcoming all-sky synoptic surveys are expected to discover, and monitor regularly, thousands of new microlensed systems. The GPU-Enabled, High-Resolution cosmological MicroLensing parameter survey (GERLUMPH) can be thought of as a theoretical counterpart of an all-sky survey, which explores the microlensing parameter space in preparation for these new discoveries. GERLUMPH's high resolution magnification maps, the basic tool for cosmological microlensing, allow for statistical studies of accretion disk models and comparisons to observations. I will discuss the first GERLUMPH data release of 3060 magnification maps produced using gSTAR, the GPU-Supercomputer for Theoretical Astrophysics Research, and the publicly available eResearch tools which aim to simplify their use.