Fast computation of quadrupole and hexadecapole approximations in microlensing with a single point-source evaluation
Abstract
The exoplanet detection rate from gravitational microlensing has grown significantly in recent years thanks to a great enhancement of resources and improved observational strategy. Current observatories include ground-based wide-field and/or robotic world-wide networks of telescopes, as well as space-based observatories such as satellites Spitzer or Kepler/K2. This results in a large quantity of data to be processed and analyzed, which is a challenge for modeling codes because of the complexity of the parameter space to be explored, and the intensive computations required to evaluate the models. In this work, I present a method that allows to compute the quadrupole and hexadecapole approximation of the finite-source magnification with more efficiency that previously available codes, with routines about x6 and x4 faster respectively. The quadrupole takes just about twice the time of a point-source evaluation, which advocates for generalizing its use to large portion of the light curves. The corresponding routines are available as open-source python codes.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1703.03600,
title = {Fast computation of quadrupole and hexadecapole approximations in microlensing with a single point-source evaluation},
author = {A. Cassan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.03600},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
Published in MNRAS (7 pages, 2 figures, 1 table). Open source codes available on GitHub (cf. reference in the paper)