Dark lens candidates from Gaia Data Release 3
Abstract
Gravitational microlensing is a phenomenon that allows us to observe dark remnants of stellar evolution even if they no longer emit electromagnetic radiation. In particular, it can be useful to observe solitary neutron stars or stellar-mass black holes, providing a unique window through which to understand stellar evolution. Obtaining direct mass measurements with this technique requires precise observations of both the change in brightness and the position of the microlensed star. The European Space Agency's Gaia satellite can provide both. Using publicly available data from different surveys, we analysed events published in the Gaia Data Release 3 (Gaia DR3) microlensing catalogue. Here we describe our selection of candidate dark lenses, where we suspect the lens is a white dwarf (WD), a neutron star (NS), a black hole (BH), or a mass-gap object, with a mass in a range between the heaviest NS and the least massive BH. We estimated the mass of the lenses using information obtained from the best-fitting microlensing models, the source star, the Galactic model and the expected distribution of the parameters. We found eleven candidates for dark remnants: one WDs, three NS, three mass-gap objects, and four BHs.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2401.13759,
title = {Dark lens candidates from Gaia Data Release 3},
author = {K. Kruszyńska and Ł. Wyrzykowski and K. A. Rybicki and K. Howil and M. Jabłońska and Z. Kaczmarek and N. Ihanec and M. Maskoliūnas and M. Bronikowski and U. Pylypenko and A. Udalski and P. Mróz and R. Poleski and J. Skowron and M. K. Szymański and I. Soszyński and P. Pietrukowicz and S. Kozłowski and K. Ulaczyk and P. Iwanek and M. Wrona and M. Gromadzki and M. J. Mróz and F. Abe and K. Bando and R. Barry and D. P. Bennett and A. Bhattacharya and I. A. Bond and A. Fukui and R. Hamada and S. Hamada and N. Hamasaki and Y. Hirao and S. Ishitani Silva and Y. Itow and N. Koshimoto and Y. Matsubara and S. Miyazaki and Y. Muraki and T. Nagai and K. Nunota and G. Olmschenk and C. Ranc and N. J. Rattenbury and Y. Satoh and T. Sumi and D. Suzuki and P. J. Tristram and A. Vandorou and H. Yama},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.13759},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
Accepted to Astronomy&Astrophysics, 20 pages, 4 figures, 6 tables