No Arabic abstract
We report the discovery of a planet-mass companion to the microlens OGLE-2016-BLG-0263L. Unlike most low-mass companions that were detected through perturbations to the smooth and symmetric light curves produced by the primary, the companion was discovered through the channel of a repeating event, in which the companion itself produced its own single-mass light curve after the event produced by the primary had ended. Thanks to the continuous coverage of the second peak by high-cadence surveys, the possibility of the repeating nature due to source binarity is excluded with a $96%$ confidence level. The mass of the companion estimated by a Bayesian analysis is $M_{rm p}=4.1_{-2.5}^{+6.5} M_{rm J}$. The projected primary-companion separation is $a_perp = 6.5^{+1.3}_{-1.9}$ au. The ratio of the separation to the snow-line distance of $a_perp/a_{rm sl}sim 15.4$ corresponds to the region beyond Neptune, the outermost planet of the solar system. We discuss the importance of high-cadence surveys in expanding the range of microlensing detections of low-mass companions and future space-based microlensing surveys.
We present the analysis of OGLE-2016-BLG-0613, for which the lensing light curve appears to be that of a typical binary-lens event with two caustic spikes but with a discontinuous feature on the trough between the spikes. We find that the discontinuous feature was produced by a planetary companion to the binary lens. We find 4 degenerate triple-lens solution classes, each composed of a pair of solutions according to the well-known wide/close planetary degeneracy. One of these solution classes is excluded due to its relatively poor fit. For the remaining three pairs of solutions, the most-likely primary mass is about $M_1sim 0.7,M_odot$ while the planet is a super-Jupiter. In all cases the system lies in the Galactic disk, about half-way toward the Galactic bulge. However, in one of these three solution classes, the secondary of the binary system is a low-mass brown dwarf, with relative mass ratios (1 : 0.03 : 0.003), while in the two others the masses of the binary components are comparable. These two possibilities can be distinguished in about 2024 when the measured lens-source relative proper motion will permit separate resolution of the lens and source.
We present microlensing planet OGLE-2017-BLG-0173Lb, with planet-host mass ratio either $qsimeq 2.5times 10^{-5}$ or $qsimeq 6.5times 10^{-5}$, the lowest or among the lowest ever detected. The planetary perturbation is strongly detected, $Deltachi^2sim 10,000$, because it arises from a bright (therefore, large) source passing over and enveloping the planetary caustic: a so-called Hollywood event. The factor $sim 2.5$ offset in $q$ arises because of a previously unrecognized discrete degeneracy between Hollywood events in which the caustic is fully enveloped and those in which only one flank is enveloped, which we dub Cannae and von Schlieffen, respectively. This degeneracy is accidental in that it arises from gaps in the data. Nevertheless, the fact that it appears in a $Deltachi^2=10,000$ planetary anomaly is striking. We present a simple formalism to estimate the sensitivity of other Hollywood events to planets and show that they can lead to detections close to, but perhaps not quite reaching, the Earth/Sun mass ratio of $3times 10^{-6}$. This formalism also enables an analytic understanding of the factor $sim 2.5$ offset in $q$ between the Cannae and von Schlieffen solutions. The Bayesian estimates for the host-mass, system distance, and planet-host projected separation are $M=0.39^{+0.40}_{-0.24},M_odot$, $D_L=4.8^{+1.5}_{-1.8},kpc$, and $a_perp=3.8pm 1.6,au$. The two estimates of the planet mass are $m_p=3.3^{+3.8}_{-2.1},M_oplus$ and $m_p=8^{+11}_{-6},M_oplus$. The measured lens-source relative proper motion $mu=6,masyr$ will permit imaging of the lens in about 15 years or at first light on adaptive-optics imagers on next-generation telescopes. These will allow to measure the host mass but probably cannot resolve the planet-host mass-ratio degeneracy.
The mass function and statistics of binaries provide important diagnostics of the star formation process. Despite this importance, the mass function at low masses remains poorly known due to observational difficulties caused by the faintness of the objects. Here we report the microlensing discovery and characterization of a binary lens composed of very low-mass stars just above the hydrogen-burning limit. From the combined measurements of the Einstein radius and microlens parallax, we measure the masses of the binary components of $0.10pm 0.01 M_odot$ and $0.09pm 0.01 M_odot$. This discovery demonstrates that microlensing will provide a method to measure the mass function of all Galactic populations of very low mass binaries that is independent of the biases caused by the luminosity of the population.
Due to the nature depending on only the gravitational field, microlensing, in principle, provides an important tool to detect faint and even dark brown dwarfs. However, the number of identified brown dwarfs is limited due to the difficulty of the lens mass measurement that is needed to check the substellar nature of the lensing object. In this work, we report a microlensing brown dwarf discovered from the analysis of the gravitational binary-lens event OGLE-2014-BLG-1112. We identify the brown-dwarf nature of the lens companion by measuring the lens mass from the detections of both microlens-parallax and finite-source effects. We find that the companion has a mass of $(3.03 pm 0.78)times 10^{-2} M_odot$ and it is orbiting a solar-type primary star with a mass of $1.07 pm 0.28 M_odot$. The estimated projected separation between the lens components is $9.63 pm 1.33$ au and the distance to the lens is $4.84 pm 0.67$ kpc. We discuss the usefulness of space-based microlensing observations in detecting brown dwarfs through the channel of binary-lens events.
We present the analysis of stellar binary microlensing event OGLE-2015-BLG-0060 based on observations obtained from 13 different telescopes. Intensive coverage of the anomalous parts of the light curve was achieved by automated follow-up observations from the robotic telescopes of the Las Cumbres Observatory. We show that, for the first time, all main features of an anomalous microlensing event are well covered by follow-up data, allowing us to estimate the physical parameters of the lens. The strong detection of second-order effects in the event light curve necessitates the inclusion of longer-baseline survey data in order to constrain the parallax vector. We find that the event was most likely caused by a stellar binary-lens with masses $M_{star1} = 0.87 pm 0.12 M_{odot}$ and $M_{star2} = 0.77 pm 0.11 M_{odot}$. The distance to the lensing system is 6.41 $pm 0.14$ kpc and the projected separation between the two components is 13.85 $pm 0.16$ AU. Alternative interpretations are also considered.