No Arabic abstract
We present observations of 8 Galactic Bulge microlensing events taken with the 1.0m JKT on La Palma during 2000 June and July. The JKT observing schedule was optimized using a prioritizing algorithm to automatically update the target list. For most of these events we have sampled the lightcurves at times where no information was available from the OGLE alert team. We assume a point-source point-lens (PSPL) model and perform a maximum likelihood fit to both our data and the OGLE data to constrain the event parameters of the fit. We then refit the data assuming a binary lens and proceed to calculate the probability of detecting planets with mass ratio $q=10^{-3}$. We have seen no clear signatures of planetary deviations on any of the 8 events and we quantify constraints on the presence of planetary companions to the lensing stars. For two well observed events, 2000BUL31 and 2000BUL33, our detection probabilities peak at $sim$30% and $sim$20% respectively for $q=10^{-3}$ and $a sim R_{E}$ for a $Deltachi^2$ threshold value of 60.
We analyze the data of the gravitational microlensing survey carried out by by the MOA group during 2000 towards the Galactic Bulge (GB). Our observations are designed to detect efficiently high magnification events with faint source stars and short timescale events, by increasing the the sampling rate up to 6 times per night and using Difference Image Analysis (DIA). We detect 28 microlensing candidates in 12 GB fields corresponding to 16 deg^2. We use Monte Carlo simulations to estimate our microlensing event detection efficiency, where we construct the I-band extinction map of our GB fields in order to find dereddened magnitudes. We find a systematic bias and large uncertainty in the measured value of the timescale $t_{rm Eout}$ in our simulations. They are associated with blending and unresolved sources, and are allowed for in our measurements. We compute an optical depth tau = 2.59_{-0.64}^{+0.84} times 10^{-6} towards the GB for events with timescales 0.3<t_E<200 days. We consider disk-disk lensing, and obtain an optical depth tau_{bulge} = 3.36_{-0.81}^{+1.11} times 10^{-6}[0.77/(1-f_{disk})] for the bulge component assuming a 23% stellar contribution from disk stars. These observed optical depths are consistent with previous measurements by the MACHO and OGLE groups, and still higher than those predicted by existing Galactic models. We present the timescale distribution of the observed events, and find there are no significant short events of a few days, in spite of our high detection efficiency for short timescale events down to t_E = 0.3 days. We find that half of all our detected events have high magnification (>10). These events are useful for studies of extra-solar planets.
We describe observations carried out by the MOA group of the Galactic Bulge during 2000 that were designed to detect efficiently gravitational microlensing of faint stars in which the magnification is high and/or of short duration. These events are particularly useful for studies of extra-solar planets and faint stars. Approximately 17 degrees square were monitored at a sampling rate of up to 6 times per night. The images were analysed in real-time using a difference imaging technique. Twenty microlensing candidates were detected, of which 8 were alerted to the microlensing community whilst in progress. Approximately half of the candidates had high magnifications (>~10), at least one had very high magnification (>~50), and one exhibited a clear parallax effect. The details of these events are reported here, together with details of the on-line difference imaging technique. Some nova-like events were also observed and these are described, together with one asteroid.
Perhaps as many as 30 parallax microlensing events are known, thanks to the efforts of the MACHO, OGLE, EROS and MOA experiments monitoring the bulge. Using Galactic models, we construct mock catalogues of microlensing light curves towards the bulge, allowing for the uneven sampling and observational error bars of the OGLE-II experiment. The fraction of parallax events with delta chi^2 > 50 in the OGLE-II database is around ~1%, though higher fractions are reported by some other surveys. This is in accord with expectations from standard Galactic models. The fraction of parallax events depends strongly on the Einstein crossing time (t_E), being less than 5% at t_E = 50 days but rising to 50% at t_E > 1 yr. We find that the existence of parallax signatures is essentially controlled by the acceleration of the observer normalised to the projected Einstein radius on the observer plane divided by t_E^2. The properties of the parallax events - time-scales, projected velocities, source and lens locations - in our mock catalogues are analysed. Typically, ~38% of parallax events are caused by a disk star microlensing a bulge source, while ~33% are caused by a disk star microlensing a disk source (of these disk sources, one sixth are at a distance of 5 kpc or less). There is a significant shift in mean time-scale from 32 d for all events to ~130d for our parallax events. There are corresponding shifts for other parameters, such as the lens-source velocity projected onto the observer plane (~1110 km/s for all events versus ~80 km/s for parallax events) and the lens distance (6.7 kpc versus 3.7 kpc). We also assess the performance of parallax mass estimators and investigate whether our mock catalogue can reproduce events with features similar to a number of conjectured `black hole lens candidates.
Modern surveys of gravitational microlensing events have progressed to detecting thousands per year. Surveys are capable of probing Galactic structure, stellar evolution, lens populations, black hole physics, and the nature of dark matter. One of the key avenues for doing this is studying the microlensing Einstein radius crossing time distribution ($t_E$). However, systematics in individual light curves as well as over-simplistic modeling can lead to biased results. To address this, we developed a model to simultaneously handle the microlensing parallax due to Earths motion, systematic instrumental effects, and unlensed stellar variability with a Gaussian Process model. We used light curves for nearly 10,000 OGLE-III and IV Milky Way bulge microlensing events and fit each with our model. We also developed a forward model approach to infer the timescale distribution by forward modeling from the data rather than using point estimates from individual events. We find that modeling the variability in the baseline removes a source of significant bias in individual events, and previous analyses over-estimated the number of long timescale ($t_E>100$ days) events due to their over simplistic models ignoring parallax effects and stellar variability. We use our fits to identify hundreds of events that are likely black holes.
We present an analysis of the large set of microlensing events detected so far toward the Galactic center with the purpose of investigating whether some of the dark lenses are located in Galactic globular clusters. We find that in four cases some events might indeed be due to lenses located in the globular clusters themselves. We also give a rough estimate for the average lens mass of the events being highly aligned with Galactic globular cluster centers and find that, under reasonable assumptions, the deflectors could most probably be either brown dwarfs, M-stars or stellar remnants.