Constraining the Light Curves of Magnified Stellar Events at z ~ 0.725
Abstract
Extreme magnification by lensing galaxy clusters allows the detection of high-luminosity stars during cluster caustic transient events at cosmological distances. The Dragon Arc at z=0.725 is a frontier target for identifying transient events due to its high frequency of microlensing events, and so far >100 of these events have been detected. The high frequency of events and high cadence of observations allow for the measurement of minimal flux variation between epochs, and therefore the magnification evolution as a source approaches or recedes from a microcaustic can be measured from light curves. In this work, we model the light curves of 10 transient events in the Dragon Arc across eight epochs from two JWST/NIRCam medium-band filters taken over four days. Injected synthetic observations demonstrate that with additional observations, individual transient light curves allow the of apparent degeneracies between stellar characteristics and properties of motion.
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BibTeX
@misc{meyerhoff2026constraining,
title = {{Constraining the Light Curves of Magnified Stellar Events at z ~ 0.725}},
author = {Carter Meyerhoff and Hayley Williams and Rafael Ortiz III and Gibson B. Bowling and Rogier A. Windhorst and Zach Borowiak and Hunter Sparks and Charles L. Steinhardt},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.33925},
eprint = {2609.33925},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33925},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Constraining the Light Curves of Magnified Stellar Events at z ~ 0.725
AU - Carter Meyerhoff
AU - Hayley Williams
AU - Rafael Ortiz III
AU - Gibson B. Bowling
AU - Rogier A. Windhorst
AU - Zach Borowiak
AU - Hunter Sparks
AU - Charles L. Steinhardt
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/27
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.33925
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33925
AB - Extreme magnification by lensing galaxy clusters allows the detection of high-luminosity stars during cluster caustic transient events at cosmological distances. The Dragon Arc at z=0.725 is a frontier target for identifying transient events due to its high frequency of microlensing events, and so far >100 of these events have been detected. The high frequency of events and high cadence of observations allow for the measurement of minimal flux variation between epochs, and therefore the magnification evolution as a source approaches or recedes from a microcaustic can be measured from light curves. In this work, we model the light curves of 10 transient events in the Dragon Arc across eight epochs from two JWST/NIRCam medium-band filters taken over four days. Injected synthetic observations demonstrate that with additional observations, individual transient light curves allow the of apparent degeneracies between stellar characteristics and properties of motion.
ER -