English

Mass Determination With Gravitational Microlensing

Astrophysics 2009-10-28 v1

Abstract

We present a simple toy model of the distribution of objects responsible for gravitational microlensing. We use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate how difficult it is to determine the parameters of the lens mass distribution on the basis of the observed distribution of event time scales. A robust determination requires 100 \sim 100 events, or more, even if the geometry of lens distribution, and the lens kinematics are known.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9604002,
  title  = {Mass Determination With Gravitational Microlensing},
  author = {Shude Mao and Bohdan Paczyński},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9604002},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

19 pages in postscript (four figures included), submitted to ApJ