Garching: ``Hands-on Strong Gravitational Lensing School'
A participant of the BELISSIMA project, Mr. Marko Stalevski, participated in a 4-day practical training at ``Hands-on Strong Gravitational Lensing School'' held at Excellence Cluster Universe, Garching, Germany from 14th to 17th June 2011, for PhD and younger prospective graduate students in Astronomy and Physics.
The aims of the school were diverse:
to spread knowledge on the value of strong lensing to the young international astronomical community, beyond the small group of experienced students;
to boost the productivity of students and to foster friendly collaboration with post-docs working actively in lensing;
to encourage new scientific projects among the students and the invited/local speakers.
The following topics were discussed: strong lensing theory, lenses as cosmological telescopes, strong lensing and stellar population models, cosmological applications of strong lensing, substructure studies with strong lensing and strong lensing and stellar dynamics.
In the afternoons, students attended practical tutorials. A number of interesting phenomena and ongoing investigations were discussed, among which some are within a reach of 1.50m-class telescopes such as the "Milanković" telescope: measuring time delays for lensed quasars from optical light curves (e.g. the COSMOGRAIL project), which can be used to constrain Hubble constant and other cosmological parameters.
Mr. Stalevski presented his work in a short talk (12 min), including his work on 3D radiative transfer modelling of AGN dusty tori, influence of microlensing on infrared radiation of dusty tori, and future plans for investigating influence of strong lensing on dusty tori. The observations needed are planned to be performed using the "Milanković" telescope which the BELISSIMA project plans to mount at the top of the Vidojevica mountain.
