Related papers: Measuring the mass function of isolated stellar re…
Gravitational microlensing may detect dark stellar remnants - black holes or neutron stars - even if they are isolated. However, it is challenging to estimate masses of isolated dark stellar remnants using solely photometric data for…
Most stellar remnants so far have been found in binary systems, where they interact with matter from their companions. Isolated neutron stars and black holes are difficult to find as they are dark, yet they are predicted to exist in our…
Context: Gravitational microlensing is sensitive to compact-object lenses in the Milky Way, including white dwarfs, neutron stars or black holes, and could potentially probe a wide range of stellar remnant masses. However, the mass of the…
Isolated black holes and neutron stars can be revealed through the observation of long duration gravitational microlensing events. A few candidates have been found in surveys of stars in the direction of the Galactic bulge. Recently, thanks…
Gravitational microlensing is a phenomenon that allows us to observe dark remnants of stellar evolution even if they no longer emit electromagnetic radiation. In particular, it can be useful to observe solitary neutron stars or stellar-mass…
OGLE and other projects are likely to discover first stellar mass black holes and the first planets through gravitational lensing in the next year or two. It is important to have follow-up projects ready, using diverse observing methods.…
The longest microlensing events provide enough information to estimate the mass and distance of the lens. Among hundreds of millions of stars which were monitored for many years by the OGLE project we selected those with clear parallax…
While dozens of stellar mass black holes have been discovered in binary systems, isolated black holes have eluded detection. Their presence can be inferred when they lens light from a background star. We attempt to detect the astrometric…
Gravitational lensing provides a means to measure mass that does not rely on detecting and analysing light from the lens itself. Compact objects are ideal gravitational lenses, because they have relatively large masses and are dim. In this…
We present the analysis of five black hole candidates identified from gravitational microlensing surveys. Hubble Space Telescope astrometric data and densely sampled lightcurves from ground-based microlensing surveys are fit with a…
We report on the first results from a large-scale observing campaign aiming to use astrometric microlensing to detect and place limits on the mass of single objects, including stellar remnants. We used the Hubble Space Telescope to monitor…
Microlensing is the only known direct method to measure the masses of stars that lack visible companions. In terms of microlensing observables, the mass is given by M=(c^2/4G)\tilde r_E \theta_E and so requires the measurement of both the…
The mass function and statistics of binaries provide important diagnostics of the star formation process. Despite this importance, the mass function at low masses remains poorly known due to observational difficulties caused by the…
Two independent groups reported the discovery of an isolated dark stellar remnant in the microlensing event OGLE-2011-BLG-0462 based on photometric ground-based observations coupled with astrometric measurements taken with the Hubble Space…
The masses of stars including stellar remnants are almost exclusively known from binary systems. In this work, we study gravitational microlensing of faint background galaxies by isolated neutron stars (pulsars). We show that the resulting…
Recently the Polish-American collaboration OGLE has reported the observation of four possible microlensing events by monitoring, over several months, the brightness of millions of stars in the region of the galactic bulge. If these events…
In the pursuit of understanding the population of stellar remnants within the Milky Way, we analyze the sample of $\sim 950$ microlensing events observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope between 2014 and 2019. In this study we focus on a…
We investigate the impact of combining Gaia astrometry from space with precise, high cadence OGLE photometry from the ground. For the archival event OGLE3-ULENS-PAR-02, which is likely a black hole, we simulate a realistic astrometric…
I show that by observing microlensing events both astrometrically and photometrically, the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) can measure the mass function of stellar remnants in the Galactic bulge including white dwarfs, neutron stars, and…
The analysis of the first three years of the OGLE data revealed 12 microlensing events of the Galactic bulge stars, with the characteristic time scales in the range $ 8.6 < t_0 < 80 $ days, where $ t_0 = R_E / V $. A complete sample of nine…