Weak Microlensing
Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
2015-05-14 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Abstract
A nearby star having a near-transit of a galaxy will cause a time-dependent weak lensing of the galaxy. Because the effect is small, we refer to this as weak microlensing. This could provide a useful method to weigh low-mass stars and brown dwarfs. We examine the feasibility of measuring masses in this way and we find that a star causes measurable weak microlensing in a galaxy even at 10 Einstein radii away. Of order one magnitude I < 25 galaxy comes close enough to one or other of the ~100 nearest stars per year.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0912.0515,
title = {Weak Microlensing},
author = {Jonathan Coles and Prasenjit Saha and Hans Martin Schmid},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0912.0515},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in MNRAS (4 pages, 5 figures, 1 table)