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Seminar
Understanding the new populations of distant lensed stars and remnants discovered by LIGO & JWST at z>1

Abstract

The chirp masses of the 90 blackhole binaries detected by LIGO are visibly bimodal which we demonstrate means that 80% of these events are highly magnified, with redshifts spanning z=1-4, whereas 20% are unlensed at low redshift z<0.3, with black hole masses of 8-12 M_sun, like stellar black hole remnants in our Galaxy. We have uncovered a similar surprising population of massive black hole progenitor stars at high redshift in deep Hubble & JWST imaging that lie on the Einstein rings of lensing clusters. The relative motions of the lens-source-observer frames allows the detection and recognition of luminous stars that transit a critical curve, so that individual lensed stars are visible at high redshift z=1-7, with high magnifications of typically 1000. Both of these massive star related populations seen by LIGO and JWST are surprisingly abundant, straining conventional lensing calculations and furthermore many of the lensed stars are found offset from the critical curves of standard smooth dark matter predictions. We argue that the highly corrugated pattern of lensing we predict for Wave Dark Matter is enhancing the lensing rate of stars and black holes and also accounts for the positional offsets at a level of ~20pc corresponding to coherent bosonic dark matter of mass 10^{-22}eV.