No Arabic abstract
Motivated by the ongoing Spitzer observational campaign, and the forecoming K2 one, we revisit, working in an heliocentric reference frame, the geometrical foundation for the analysis of the microlensing parallax, as measured with the simultaneous observation of the same microlensing event from two observers with relative distance of order AU. For the case of observers at rest we discuss the well known fourfold microlensing parallax degeneracy and determine an equation for the degenerate directions of the lens trajectory. For the case of observers in motion, we write down an extension of the Gould (1994) relationship between the microlensing parallax and the observable quantities and, at the same time, we highlight the functional dependence of these same quantities from the timescale of the underlying microlensing event. Furthermore, through a series of examples, we show the importance of taking into account the motion of the observers to correctly recover the parameters of the underlying microlensing event. In particular we discuss the cases of the amplitude of the microlensing parallax and that of the difference of the timescales between the observed microlensing events, key to understand the breaking of the microlensing parallax degeneracy. Finally, we consider the case of the simultaneous observation of the same microlensing event from ground and two satellites, a case relevant for the expected joint K2 and Spitzer observational programs in 2016.
In gravitational microlensing, binary systems may act as lenses or sources. Identifying lens binarity is generally easy especially in events characterized by caustic crossing since the resulting light curve exhibits strong deviations from smooth single-lensing light curve. On the contrary, light curves with minor deviations from a Paczynski behaviour do not allow one to identify the source binarity. A consequence of the gravitational microlensing is the shift of the position of the multiple image centroid with respect to the source star location - the so called astrometric microlensing signal. When the astrometric signal is considered, the presence of a binary source manifests with a path that largely differs from that expected for single-source events. Here, we investigate the astrometric signatures of binary sources taking into account their orbital motion and the parallax effect due to the Earth motion, which turn out not to be negligible in most cases. We also show that considering the above-mentioned effects is important in the analysis of astrometric data in order to correctly estimate the lens-event parameters.
We report the mass and distance measurements of two single-lens events from the 2017 Spitzer microlensing campaign. The ground-based observations yield the detection of finite-source effects, and the microlens parallaxes are derived from the joint analysis of ground-based observations and Spitzer observations. We find that the lens of OGLE-2017-BLG-1254 is a $0.60 pm 0.03 M_{odot}$ star with $D_{rm LS} = 0.53 pm 0.11~text{kpc}$, where $D_{rm LS}$ is the distance between the lens and the source. The second event, OGLE-2017-BLG-1161, is subject to the known satellite parallax degeneracy, and thus is either a $0.51^{+0.12}_{-0.10} M_{odot}$ star with $D_{rm LS} = 0.40 pm 0.12~text{kpc}$ or a $0.38^{+0.13}_{-0.12} M_{odot}$ star with $D_{rm LS} = 0.53 pm 0.19~text{kpc}$. Both of the lenses are therefore isolated stars in the Galactic bulge. By comparing the mass and distance distributions of the eight published Spitzer finite-source events with the expectations from a Galactic model, we find that the Spitzer sample is in agreement with the probability of finite-source effects occurrence in single lens events.
Gravitational microlensing can detect isolated stellar-mass black holes (BHs), which are believed to be the dominant form of Galactic BHs according to population synthesis models. Previous searches for BH events in microlensing data focused on long-timescale events with significant microlensing parallax detections. Here we show that, although BH events preferentially have long timescales, the microlensing parallax amplitudes are so small that in most cases the parallax signals cannot be detected statistically significantly. We then identify OGLE-2006-BLG-044 to be a candidate BH event because of its long timescale and small microlensing parallax. Our findings have implications to future BH searches in microlensing data.
Microlensing detections of cool planets are important for the construction of an unbiased sample to estimate the frequency of planets beyond the snow line, which is where giant planets are thought to form according to the core accretion theory of planet formation. In this paper, we report the discovery of a giant planet detected from the analysis of the light curve of a high-magnification microlensing event MOA-2010-BLG-477. The measured planet-star mass ratio is $q=(2.181pm0.004)times 10^{-3}$ and the projected separation is $s=1.1228pm0.0006$ in units of the Einstein radius. The angular Einstein radius is unusually large $theta_{rm E}=1.38pm 0.11$ mas. Combining this measurement with constraints on the microlens parallax and the lens flux, we can only limit the host mass to the range $0.13<M/M_odot<1.0$. In this particular case, the strong degeneracy between microlensing parallax and planet orbital motion prevents us from measuring more accurate host and planet masses. However, we find that adding Bayesian priors from two effects (Galactic model and Keplerian orbit) each independently favors the upper end of this mass range, yielding star and planet masses of $M_*=0.67^{+0.33}_{-0.13} M_odot$ and $m_p=1.5^{+0.8}_{-0.3} M_{rm JUP}$ at a distance of $D=2.3pm0.6$ kpc, and with a semi-major axis of $a=2^{+3}_{-1}$ AU. Finally, we show that the lens mass can be determined from future high-resolution near-IR adaptive optics observations independently from two effects, photometric and astrometric.
The kinematics of isolated brown dwarfs in the Galaxy, beyond the solar neighborhood, is virtually unknown. Microlensing has the potential to probe this hidden population, as it can measure both the mass and five of the six phase-space coordinates (all except the radial velocity) even of a dark isolated lens. However, the measurements of both the microlens parallax and finite-source effects are needed in order to recover the full information. Here, we combine $Spitzer$ satellite parallax measurement with the ground-based light curve, which exhibits strong finite-source effects, of event OGLE-2017-BLG-0896. We find two degenerate solutions for the lens (due to the known satellite-parallax degeneracy), which are consistent with each other except for their proper motion. The lens is an isolated brown dwarf with a mass of either $18pm1M_J$ or $20pm1M_J$. This is the lowest isolated-object mass measurement to date, only $sim$45% more massive than the theoretical deuterium-fusion boundary at solar metallicity, which is the common definition of a free-floating planet. The brown dwarf is located at either $3.9pm0.1$ kpc or $4.1pm0.1$ kpc toward the Galactic bulge, but with proper motion in the opposite direction of disk stars, with one solution suggesting it is moving within the Galactic plane. While it is possibly a halo brown dwarf, it might also represent a different, unknown population.