The Applicability of the Astrometric Method in Determining the Physical Parameters of Gravitational Microlenses

In this paper, we investigate the applicability of the astrometric method to the determination of the lens parameters for gravitational microlensing events toward both the LMC and the Galactic bulge. For this analysis, we investigate the dependency of the astrometrically determined angular Einstein ring radius, $\Delta(\theta_{\rm E}/\theta_{\rm E,0})$, on the lens parameters by testing various types of events. In addition, by computing $\Delta(\theta_{\rm E}/\theta_{\rm E,0})$ for events with lensing parameters which are the most probable for a given lens mass under the standard models of Galactic matter density and velocity distributions, we determine the expected distribution of the uncertainties as a function of lens mass. From this study, we find that the values of the angular Einstein ring radius are expected to be measured with uncertainties $\Delta(\theta_{\rm E}/\theta_{\rm E,0}) \lesssim 10$ up to a lens mass of $M\sim 0.1 M_\odot$ for both Galactic disk-bulge and halo-LMC events with a moderate observational strategy. The uncertainties are relatively large for Galactic bulge-bulge self-lensing events, $\Delta(\theta_{\rm E}/\theta_{\rm E,0}) \sim 25$ for $M\sim 0.1 M_\odot$, but they can be substantially reduced by adopting more aggressive observational strategies. We also find that although astrometric observations can be performed for most photometrically detected Galactic bulge events, a significant fraction ($\sim 45$) of LMC events cannot be astrometrically observed due to the faintness of their source stars.Comment: 16 pages, including 2 tables and 4 figures, submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Socirt

Blending in Future Space-based Microlensing Surveys

We investigate the effect of blending in future gravitational microlensing surveys by carrying out simulation of Galactic bulge microlensing events to be detected from a proposed space-based lensing survey. From this simulation, we find that the contribution of the flux from background stars to the total blended flux will be equivalent to that from the lens itself despite the greatly improved resolution from space observations, implying that characterizing lenses from the analysis of the blended flux would not be easy. As a method to isolate events for which most of the blended flux is attributable to the lens, we propose to use astrometric information of source star image centroid motion. For the sample of events obtained by imposing a criterion that the centroid shift should be less than three times of the astrometric uncertainty among the events for which blending is noticed with blended light fractions $f_{\rm B}>0.2$, we estimate that the contamination of the blended flux by background stars will be less than 20% for most ($\sim 90$) of the sample events. The expected rate of these events is $\gtrsim 700$ events/yr, which is large enough for the statistical analysis of the lens populations.Comment: total 6 pages, including 5 figures, ApJ, in pres

Signs of Planetary Microlensing Signals

An extrasolar planet can be detected via microlensing from the perturbation it makes in the smooth lensing light curve of the primary. In addition to the conventional photometric microlensing, astrometric observation of the center-of-light motion of the source star image provides a new channel of detecting and characterizing extrasolar planets. It was known that the planet-induced astrometric signals tend to be positive while the photometric signals can be either positive or negative. In this paper, we analytically show the reason for these tendencies of microlensing planetary signals.Comment: accepted in Astrophysical Journa

Improved Detection Rates for Close Binaries Via Astrometric Observations of Gravitational Microlensing Events

In addition to constructing a Galactic matter mass function free from the bias induced by the hydrogen-burning limit, gravitational microlensing allows one to construct a mass function which is less affected by the problem of unresolved binaries (Gaudi & Gould). However, even with the method of microlensing, the photometric detection of binaries is limited to binary systems with relatively large separations of $b\gtrsim 0.4$ of their combined Einstein ring radius, and thus the mass function is still not totally free from the problem of unresolved binaries. In this paper, we show that by detecting distortions of the astrometric ellipse of a microlensing event with high precision instruments such as the {\it Space Interferometry Mission}, one can detect close binaries at a much higher rate than by the photometric method. We find that by astrometrically observing microlensing events, $\sim 50$ of binaries with separations of $0.1r_{\rm E}$ can be detected with the detection threshold of 3%. The proposed astrometric method is especially efficient at detecting very close binaries. With a detection threshold of 3% and a rate of 10%, one can astrometrically detect binaries with separations down to $\sim 0.01r_{\rm E}$.Comment: total 14 pages, including 5 Figures and no Table (For figure 1, please send a request mail to [email protected]), accepted to ApJ (Vol 525, 000), updated versio

Properties of Microlensing Light Curve Anomalies Induced by Multiple Planets

In this paper, we show that the pattern of microlensing light curve anomalies induced by multiple planets are well described by the superposition of those of the single-planet systems where the individual planet-primary binary pairs act as independent lens systems. Since the outer deviation regions around the planetary caustics of the individual planets occur in general at different locations, we find that the pattern of anomalies in these regions are hardly affected by the existence of other planet(s). This implies that even if an event is caused by a multiple planetary system, a simple single-planet lensing model is good enough for the description of most anomalies caused by the source passage of the outer deviation regions. Detection of the anomalies resulting from the source trajectory passing both the outer deviation regions caused by more than two planets will provide a new channel of detecting multiple planets.Comment: total 13 pages, including 6 figures and no table, MNRAS, submitted, for better quality pdf file is avalilable at http://astroph.chungbuk.ac.kr/~cheongho/publication.htm

Properties of Central Caustics in Planetary Microlensing

To maximize the number of planet detections, current microlensing follow-up observations are focusing on high-magnification events which have a higher chance of being perturbed by central caustics. In this paper, we investigate the properties of central caustics and the perturbations induced by them. We derive analytic expressions of the location, size, and shape of the central caustic as a function of the star-planet separation, $s$, and the planet/star mass ratio, $q$, under the planetary perturbative approximation and compare the results with those based on numerical computations. While it has been known that the size of the planetary caustic is \propto \sqrt{q}, we find from this work that the dependence of the size of the central caustic on $q$ is linear, i.e., \propto q, implying that the central caustic shrinks much more rapidly with the decrease of $q$ compared to the planetary caustic. The central-caustic size depends also on the star-planet separation. If the size of the caustic is defined as the separation between the two cusps on the star-planet axis (horizontal width), we find that the dependence of the central-caustic size on the separation is \propto (s+1/s). While the size of the central caustic depends both on $s$ and q, its shape defined as the vertical/horizontal width ratio, R_c, is solely dependent on the planetary separation and we derive an analytic relation between R_c and s. Due to the smaller size of the central caustic combined with much more rapid decrease of its size with the decrease of q, the effect of finite source size on the perturbation induced by the central caustic is much more severe than the effect on the perturbation induced by the planetary caustic. Abridged.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, ApJ accepte