Stellar-mass microlensing of gravitational waves

Understand

When gravitational waves pass through the nuclear star clusters of galactic lenses, they may be microlensed by the stars.

• Such microlensing can cause potentially observable beating patterns on the waveform due to waveform superposition and magnify the signal.
• On the one hand, the beating patterns and magnification could lead to the first detection of a microlensed gravitational wave.
• On the other hand, microlensing introduces a systematic error in strong lensing use-cases, such as localization and cosmography studies.