We used Gaia Data Release 2 to search for upcoming photometric microlensing events, identifying two candidates with high amplification. In the case of candidate 1, a spectrum of the lens (l1) confirms it is a usdM3 subdwarf with mass ≈0.11M⊙, while the event reaches maximum amplification of 20−10+20 mmag on November 3rd 2019 (±1d). For candidate 2, the lens (l2) is a metal-poor M dwarf with mass ≈0.38M⊙ derived from spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting, and maximum amplification of 10−10+40 mmag occurs on June 3rd 2019 (±4d). This permits a new algorithm for mass inference on the microlens. Given the predicted time, the photometric lightcurve of these events can be densely sampled by ground-based telescopes. The lightcurve is a function of the unknown lens mass, together with 8 other parameters for all of which Gaia provides measurements and uncertainties. Leveraging this prior information on the source and lens provided by Gaia's astrometric solution, and assuming that a ground-based campaign can provide 50 measurements at mmag precision, we show for example that the mass of l1 can be recovered to within 20 per cent (68 per cent confidence limit).
@article{arxiv.1809.00692,
title = {Microlens mass determination for Gaia's predicted photometric events},
author = {Peter McGill and Leigh C. Smith and N. Wyn Evans and Vasily Belokurov and Zenghua Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.00692},
year = {2018}
}