Gravitational microlensing, in case of relevant finite source size effects, provides an unique tool for the study of stellar atmospheres through the enhancement of a characteristic polarization signal. Here, we consider a set of highly magnified events and show that for different types of source stars (as hot, late type main sequence and cool giants) showing that the polarization strength may be of $\simeq 0.04$ percent for late type stars and up to a few percent for cool giants.
The number and properties of observed gravitational microlensing events depend on the distribution and kinematics of stars and other compact objects along the line of sight. In particular, precise measurements of the microlensing optical depth and event rate toward the Galactic bulge enable strict tests of competing models of the Milky Way. Previous estimates, based on samples of up to a few hundred events, gave larger values than expected from the Galactic models and were difficult to reconcile with other constraints on the Galactic structure. Here we used long-term photometric observations o…
We study a sample of 16 microlensed Galactic bulge main sequence turnoff region stars for which high dispersion spectra have been obtained with detailed abundance analyses. We demonstrate that there is a very strong and highly statistically significant correlation between the maximum magnification of the microlensed bulge star and the value of the [Fe/H] deduced from the high resolution spectrum of each object. Physics demands that this correlation, assuming it to be real, be the result of some sample bias. We suggest several possible explanations, but are forced to reject them all,and are lef…
For the past five seasons, the Angstrom Project, an international microlensing collaboration, has been making observations of the central bulge of M31, the Andromeda galaxy, searching for microlensing events. This thesis describes the work that has been done to develop an automatic candidate selection pipeline which enables lensing candidates to be found even if they are blended with periodic variable baseline, something which has never been attempted before in the same way. As a by-product of this process, many variable stars are found and their properties are investigated and characterised. …
Following the suggestion of Gould and Depoy (1998) we investigate the feasibility of studying the brightest microlensing events towards the Galactic bulge using a small aperture (~10 cm) telescope. We used one of the HAT telescopes to obtain 151 exposures spanning 88 nights in 2005 of an 8.4x8.4 square degree FOV centered on (l,b) = (2.85, -5.00). We reduced the data using image subtraction software. We find that such a search method can effectively contribute to monitoring bright microlensing events, as was advocated. Comparing this search method to the existing ones we find a dedicated bulge…
We developed a parametric Galactic model toward the Galactic bulge by fitting to spatial distributions of the Gaia DR2 disk velocity, VVV proper motion, BRAVA radial velocity, OGLE-III red clump star count, and OGLE-IV star count and microlens rate, optimized for use in microlensing studies. We include the asymmetric drift of Galactic disk stars and the dependence of velocity dispersion on Galactic location in the kinematic model, which has been ignored in most previous models used for microlensing studies. We show that our model predicts a microlensing parameter distribution significantly dif…
The \textit{Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope} (\textit{ Roman}) will provide an enormous number of microlensing light curves with much better photometric precisions than ongoing ground-based observations. Such light curves will enable us to observe high-order microlensing effects which have been previously difficult to detect. In this paper, we investigate \textit{Roman}'s potential to detect and characterize short-period planets and brown dwarfs (BDs) in source systems using the orbital motion of source stars, the so-called xallarap effect. We analytically estimate the measurement uncertaint…
An Updated SynthPop Model for Microlensing Simulations I: Model Description & Evaluation
University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；Louisiana State University（路易斯安那州立大学）；NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory（美国宇航局喷气推进实验室）；Space Science Institute（空间科学研究所）；Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory（劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室）；Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学天文学研究所）
For the first time we detected microlensing events at zero latitude in the Galactic bulge using the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea Survey (VVV) data. We have discovered a total sample of N = 630 events within an area covering 20.7 sq. deg. Using the near-IR color magnitude diagram we selected N = 291 red clump sources, allowing us to analyse the longitude dependence of microlensing across the central region of the Galactic plane. We thoroughly accounted for the photometric and sampling efficiency. The spatial distribution is homogeneous, with the number of events smoothly increasing toward …
The VVV microlensing search has recently surveyed the region of the Galactic plane at b=0 within -10.00 < l < 10.44 deg. in the near-infrared (IR), discovering hundreds of microlensing events. In this paper we explore the microlensing events with background sources that might be located in the far disk of the Galaxy, beyond the bulge. We discuss the possible configurations for the microlensing lenses and sources located at different places within the Galactic plane. Then we search for these events using the local red clump centroids of the VVV near-IR color-magnitude diagrams. According to the…
Gravitational microlensing, when finite size source effects are relevant, provides an unique tool for the study of source star stellar atmospheres through an enhancement of a characteristic polarization signal. This is due to the differential magnification induced during the crossing of the source star. In this paper we consider a specific set of reported highly magnified, both single and binary exoplanetary systems, microlensing events towards the Galactic bulge and evaluate the expected polarization signal. To this purpose, we consider several polarization models which apply to different typ…
Microlensing is a powerful technique to study the Galactic population of "dark" objects such as exoplanets both bound and unbound, brown dwarfs, low-luminosity stars, old white dwarfs, neutron stars, and almost the only way to study isolated stellar-mass black holes. The majority of previous efforts to search for gravitational microlensing events have concentrated towards high-density fields such as the Galactic bulge. Microlensing events in the Galactic plane have the advantage of closer proximity and better constrained relative proper motions, leading to better constrained lens mass estimate…
Gravitational microlensing is a powerful tool to search for a population of invisible black holes (BHs) in the Milky Way (MW), including isolated BHs and binary BHs at wide orbits that are complementary to gravitational wave observations. By monitoring highly populated regions of source stars like the MW bulge region, one can pursue microlensing events due to these BHs. We find that if BHs have a Salpeter-like mass function extended beyond $30M_\odot$ and a similar velocity and spatial structure to stars in the Galactic bulge and disk regions, the BH population is a dominant source of the micr…
Galactic bulge microlensing surveys provide a probe of Galactic structure. We present the first field-by-field comparison between microlensing observations and the Besançon population synthesis Galactic model. Using an updated version of the model we provide maps of optical depth, average event duration and event rate for resolved source populations and for difference imaging (DIA) events. We also compare the predicted event timescale distribution to that observed. The simulation follows the selection criteria of the MOA-II survey (Sumi et al. 2013). We modify the Besançon model to include M d…
We report the discovery of a large timescale candidate microlensing event of a bulge stellar source based on near-infrared observations with the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea Survey (VVV). The new microlensing event is projected only 3.5 arcmin away from the center of the globular cluster NGC 6553. The source appears to be a bulge giant star with magnitude Ks = 13.52, based on the position in the color-magnitude diagram. The foreground lens may be located in the globular cluster, which has well-known parameters such as distance and proper motions. If the lens is a cluster member, we can di…
We present measurements of the microlensing optical depth and event rate toward the Galactic Bulge based on two years of the MOA-II survey. This sample contains ~1000 microlensing events, with an Einstein Radius crossing time of t_E < 200 days between -5 <l< 10 degree and -7 <b< -1 degree. Our event rate and optical depth analysis uses 474 events with well defined microlensing parameters. In the central fields with |l|< 5 degree, we find an event rates of Γ= [2.39+/-1.1]e^{[0.60\pm0.05](3-|b|)}x 10^{-5}/star/yr and an optical depth of τ_{200} = [2.35+/-0.18]e^{[0.51+/-0.07](3-|b|)}x 10^{-6} fo…
Microlensing surveys have discovered thousands of events with almost all events discovered within the Galactic bulge or toward the Magellanic clouds. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), while not designed to be a microlensing campaign, is an optical time-domain survey that observes the entire northern sky every few nights including the Galactic plane. ZTF observes $\sim10^9$ stars in g-band and r-band and can significantly contribute to the observed microlensing population. We predict that ZTF will observe $\sim$1100 microlensing events in three years of observing within $10^\circ$ degrees la…
We use recent microlensing observations toward the central bulge of the Galaxy to probe the overall stellar plus brown dwarf initial mass function (IMF) in these regions well within the brown dwarf domain. We find that the IMF is consistent with the same Chabrier (2005) IMF characteristic of the Galactic disk. In contrast, other IMFs suggested in the literature overpredict the number of short-time events, thus of very-low mass stars and brown dwarfs, compared with observations. This, again, supports the suggestion that brown dwarfs and stars form predominantly via the same mechanism. We show t…
Searches for gravitational microlensing events are traditionally concentrated on the central regions of the Galactic bulge but many microlensing events are expected to occur in the Galactic plane, far from the Galactic Center. Owing to the difficulty in conducting high-cadence observations of the Galactic plane over its vast area, which are necessary for the detection of microlensing events, their global properties were hitherto unknown. Here, we present results of the first comprehensive search for microlensing events in the Galactic plane. We searched an area of almost 3000 square degrees al…
Historic microlensing events in the euclid Galactic Bulge Survey
Università di Salerno（萨莱诺大学）；Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Napoli（意大利国家核物理研究所那不勒斯分部）；Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica - Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte（意大利国家天体物理研究所卡波迪蒙特天文台）；Università degli studi di Napoli Federico II（那不勒斯费德里科二世大学）；Université Marie et Louis Pasteur, CNRS, Institut UTINAM UMR 6213（玛丽与路易·巴斯德大学，法国国家科学研究中心，UTINAM联合研究实验室）；Greenhill Observatory & School of Natural Sciences, University of Tasmania（塔斯马尼亚大学格林山天文台与自然科学学院）；Sorbonne Université, CNRS UMR 7095, Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris（索邦大学，法国国家科学研究中心，巴黎天体物理学研究所）；Université Paris-Saclay, Université Paris Cité, CEA, CNRS, AIM（巴黎萨克雷大学，巴黎西岱大学，法国原子能和替代能源委员会，法国国家科学研究中心，天体物理信息与测量联合研究实验室）
We present an analysis of Galactic bulge stars from Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) observations of the Stanek window (l,b=[0.25,-2.15]) from two epochs approximately two years apart. This dataset is adjacent to the provisional Wide-field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) microlensing field. Proper motions are measured for approximately 115,000 stars down to 28th mag in V band and 25th mag in I band, with accuracies of 0.5 mas yr$^{-1}$ (20 km s$^{-1}$) at I $\approx$ 21. A cut on the longitudinal proper motion $μ_l$ allows us to separate disk and bulge populations and…
Estimating the number of microlensing events observed in different parts of the Galactic bulge is a crucial point in planning microlensing experiments. Reliable estimates are especially important if observing resources are scarce, as is the case for space missions: K2, WFIRST, and Euclid. Here we show that the number of detected events can be reliably estimated based on statistics of stars observed in targeted fields. The statistics can be estimated relatively easily, which makes presented method suitable for planning future microlensing experiments.
We use near-infrared photometry and astrometry from the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) survey to analyse microlensing events containing annual microlensing parallax information. These events are located in highly extincted and low-latitude regions of the Galactic bulge typically off-limits to optical microlensing surveys. We fit a catalog of $1959$ events previously found in the VVV and extract $21$ microlensing parallax candidates. The fitting is done using nested sampling to automatically characterise the multi-modal and degenerate posterior distributions of the annual microlensing …
Microlensing provides a unique tool to break the stellar to dark matter degeneracy in the inner Milky Way. We combine N-body dynamical models fitted to the Milky Way's Boxy/Peanut bulge with exponential disk models outside this, and compute the microlensing properties. Considering the range of models consistent with the revised MOA-II data, we find low dark matter fractions in the inner Galaxy: at the peak of their stellar rotation curve a fraction $f_v=(0.88\pm0.07)$ of the circular velocity is baryonic (at $1σ$, $f_v > 0.72$ at $2σ$). These results are in agreement with constraints from the …
We find that significant incompleteness in stellar number counts results in a significant overestimate of the microlensing optical depth $τ$ and event rate per star per year $Γ$ toward the Galactic bulge from the first two years of the MOA-II survey. We find that the completeness in Red Clump Giant (RCG) counts $f_{\rm RC}$ decreases proportional to the galactic latitude $b$, as $f_{\rm RC}=(0.63\pm0.11)-(0.052\pm0.028)\times b$, ranging between 1 and 0.7 at $b=-6^\circ\sim-1.5^\circ$. The previous measurements using all sources by Difference Image Analysis (DIA) by MACHO and MOA-I suffer the …
We present the first short-duration candidate microlensing events from the Kepler K2 mission. From late April to early July 2016, Campaign 9 of K2 obtained high temporal cadence observations over a 3.7 square degree region of the Galactic bulge. Its primary objectives were to look for evidence of a free-floating planet (FFP) population using microlensing, and demonstrate the feasibility of space-based planetary microlensing surveys. Though Kepler K2 is far from optimal for microlensing, the recently developed MCPM photometric pipeline enables us to identify and model microlensing events. We de…
We present Keck/NIRC2 adaptive optics imaging of planetary microlensing event MOA-2007-BLG-400 that resolves the lens star system from the source. We find that the MOA-2007-BLG-400L planetary system consists of a $1.71\pm 0.27 M_{\rm Jup}$ planet orbiting a $0.69\pm 0.04M_{\odot}$ K-dwarf host star at a distance of $6.89\pm 0.77\,$kpc from the Sun. So, this planetary system probably resides in the Galactic bulge. The planet-host star projected separation is only weakly constrained due to the close-wide light curve degeneracy; the 2$σ$ projected separation range is 0.6--$7.2\,$AU. This host mas…
Galactic microlensing datasets now comprise in excess of $10^4$ events, and with the advent of next generation microlensing surveys that may be undertaken with facilities such as the Rubin Observatory (formerly LSST) and Roman Space Telescope (formerly WFIRST), this number will increase significantly. So too will the fraction of events with measurable higher order information such as finite source effects and lens-source relative proper motion. Analysing such data requires a more sophisticated Galactic microlens modeling approach. We present a new second-generation Manchester-Besançon Microlen…
We report on photometric I-band observations of 147 bright (8<I<13) periodic variables toward the Galactic bulge including 76 new discoveries. We used one of the HATnet telescopes to obtain 151 exposures spanning 88 nights in 2005 of an 8.4 x 8.4 deg^2 field of view (FOV) approximately centered on (l,b) = (1.73, -4.68). We observed the galactic bulge in 2005 as part of a microlensing feasibility study (Nataf et al. 2009), and here we discuss the periodic variables we found in our data. Among our discoveries we count 52 new eclipsing binaries and 24 other periodic variables.
Microlensing is generally studied in the geometric optics limit. However, diffraction may be important when nearby substellar objects lens occult distant stars. In particular the effects of diffraction become more important as the wavelength of the observation increases. Typically if the wavelength of the observation is comparable to the Schwarzschild radius of lensing object, diffraction leaves an observable imprint on the lensing signature. The commissioning of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) over the next decade begs the question of whether it will become possible to follow up lensing even…
I discuss the age and helium abundance of the Galactic bulge stellar population. I present examples as to how age and helium abundance can be degenerate observationally, and thus, how unstated assumptions of the helium-metallicity relation can result in biased age-metallicity determinations. I summarise efforts to tackle this degeneracy using the red giant branch bump, forward modelling of microlensing selection effects, and direct mass and metallicity measurements of stars along the red giant branch. I make the case that the degeneracy between these two parameters can be resolved in the near …
Diffraction is important when nearby substellar objects gravitationally lens distant stars. If the wavelength of the observation is comparable to the Schwarzschild radius of lensing object, diffraction leaves an observable imprint on the lensing signature. The SKA may have sufficient sensitivity to detect the typical sources, giant stars in the bulge. The diffractive signatures in a lensing event break the degeneracies between the mass of the lens, its distance and proper motion.
