Effects of Mesolensing

There are two primary observational effects of mesolensing: to distort the image of the background source, and to magnify the background light, leading the system to increase in brightness. The latter effect is most pronounced for point sources— for extended sources the magnitude of the effect is unclear, but flux conservation requires that the net effect of a lens be zero on large angular scales. This would seem to imply zero brightness increase of a uniform background extended object for unresolved lenses, and possibly for resolved lenses, as well.