Context: One of the rarest types of variability is the phenomenon of gravitational microlensing, a transient brightening of a background star due to an intervening lensing object. Microlensing is a powerful tool in studying the invisible or otherwise undetectable populations in the Milky Way, including planets and black holes. Aims: We describe the first Gaia catalogue of microlensing event candidates, give an overview of its content and discuss its validation. Methods: The catalogue of Gaia microlensing events is composed by analysing the light curves of around 2 billion sources of Gaia Data Release 3 from all over the sky covering 34 months between 2014 and 2017. Results: We present 363 Gaia microlensing events and discuss their properties. Ninety events were never reported before and were not discovered by other surveys. The contamination of the catalogue is assessed to 0.6-1.7%.
@article{arxiv.2206.06121,
title = {Gaia Data Release 3: Microlensing Events from All Over the Sky},
author = {Łukasz Wyrzykowski and K. Kruszyńska and K. A. Rybicki and B. Holl and I. Lecøe ur-Taïbi and N. Mowlavi and K. Nienartowicz and G. Jevardat de Fombelle and L. Rimoldini and M. Audard and P. Garcia-Lario and P. Gavras and D. W. Evans and S. T. Hodgkin and L. Eyer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.06121},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in A&A special issue for Gaia DR3. Tables and data also available: https://www.astrouw.edu.pl/~wyrzykow/GaiaDR3/GaiaDR3_microlensing.html