English

Rigorous "Rich Argument" in Microlensing Parallax

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2020-12-02 v1 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Astrophysics of Galaxies Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

I show that when the observables (πE,tE,θE,πs,μs)(\vec \pi_{{\rm E}},t_{{\rm E}},\theta_{{\rm E}},\pi_s,\vec \mu_s) are well measured up to a discrete degeneracy in the microlensing parallax vector πE\vec \pi_{{\rm E}}, the relative likelihood of the different solutions can be written in closed form Pi=KHiBiP_i = K H_i B_i, where HiH_i is the number of stars (potential lenses) having the mass and kinematics of the inferred parameters of solution ii and BiB_i is an additional factor that is formally derived from the Jacobian of the transformation from Galactic to microlensing parameters. The Jacobian term BiB_i constitutes an explicit evaluation of the ``Rich Argument'', i.e., that there is an extra geometric factor disfavoring large-parallax solutions in addition to the reduced frequency of lenses given by HiH_i. Here tEt_{{\rm E}} is the Einstein timescale, θE\theta_{{\rm E}} is the angular Einstein radius, and (πs,μs)(\pi_s,\vec \mu_s) are the (parallax, proper motion) of the microlensed source. I also discuss how this analytic expression degrades in the presence of finite errors in the measured observables.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2002.00947,
  title  = {Rigorous "Rich Argument" in Microlensing Parallax},
  author = {Andrew Gould},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.00947},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

4 pages, submitted to JKAS

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:29:44.652Z