Related papers: A binary origin for the first isolated stellar-mas…
Microlensing is one of the most promising methods of reconstructing the stellar mass function down to masses even below the hydrogen-burning limit. The fundamental limit to this technique is the presence of unresolved binaries, which can in…
Currently, there are 24 black hole (BH) X-ray binary systems that have been dynamically confirmed in the Galaxy. Most of them are low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) comprised of a stellar-mass BH and a low-mass donor star. Although the…
We investigate the gravitational microlensing event KMT-2019-BLG-1715, of which light curve shows two short-term anomalies from a caustic-crossing binary-lensing light curve: one with a large deviation and the other with a small deviation.…
Black-hole (BH) high-mass X-ray binary (HMXB) systems are likely to be the progenitors of BH-BH mergers detected by LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA (LVK). Yet merging BHs reach higher masses ($\sim 100M_{\odot}$) than BHs in HMXBs ($\sim 20 M_{\odot}$)…
Stellar-mass black holes ($3$ $M_\odot \lesssim M_{\rm BH} \lesssim 150$ $M_\odot$) are the natural product of the evolution of heavy stars ($M_{\rm star} \gtrsim 20$ $M_\odot$). In our Galaxy, we expect $10^8$-$10^9$ stellar-mass black…
We present the analysis of OGLE-2016-BLG-0613, for which the lensing light curve appears to be that of a typical binary-lens event with two caustic spikes but with a discontinuous feature on the trough between the spikes. We find that the…
Since the first discovery of microlensing events nearly two decades ago, gravitational microlensing has accumulated tens of TBytes of data and developed into a powerful astrophysical technique with diverse applications. The review starts…
Current theoretical models predict a mass gap with a dearth of stellar black holes (BHs) between roughly $50\,M_\odot$ and $100\,M_\odot$, while, above the range accessible through massive star evolution, intermediate-mass BHs (IMBHs) still…
We report the detection and mass measurement of a binary lens OGLE-2015-BLG-1285La,b, with the more massive component having $M_1>1.35\,M_\odot$ (80% probability). A main-sequence star in this mass range is ruled out by limits on blue…
We report the analysis of microlensing event OGLE-2017-BLG-1038, observed by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, Korean Microlensing Telescope Network, and Spitzer telescopes. The event is caused by a giant source star in the…
The recently discovered binary LB-1 has been reported to contain a $\sim$\,$70\,M_{\odot}$ black hole (BH). The evidence for the unprecedentedly high mass of the unseen companion comes from reported radial velocity (RV) variability of the…
We analyze the binary gravitational microlensing event OGLE-2017-BLG-1130 (mass ratio q~0.45), the first published case in which the binary anomaly was only detected by the Spitzer Space Telescope. This event provides strong evidence that…
Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHs) are expected to result from galaxy mergers, and thus are natural byproducts (and probes) of hierarchical structure formation in the Universe. They are also the primary expected source of…
Stellar-mass binary black holes (BBHs) may merge in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole (SMBH). It is suggested that the gravitational-wave (GW) emitted by a BBH has a high probability to be lensed by the SMBH if the BBH's orbit…
Liu et al. (2019) recently reported the detection of a 68 [+11/-13] solar mass (Msun) black hole (BH) paired with an 8.2 [+0.9/-1.2] Msun B-type sub-giant star in the 78.9-day spectroscopic binary system LB-1. Such a black hole is over…
We report the discovery of a planet in a binary that was discovered from the analysis of the microlensing event OGLE-2018-BLG-1700. We identify the triple nature of the lens from the fact that the complex anomaly pattern can be decomposed…
Optical observations of normal-stars in binary systems with massive unseen objects have been proposed to search for candidate black holes (BHs) and provide a direct measurement of their dynamical masses. In this paper, we have performed…
There has recently been interest in multi-Solar mass Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) as a dark matter (DM) candidate. There are various microlensing, dynamical and accretion constraints on the abundance of PBHs in this mass range. Taken at…
Aims. To search for these rare objects, we study 32 Galactic O-type stars that were reported as SB1s in the literature. In our sample we include Cyg X-1, which is known to host an accreting stellar-mass BH, and HD 74194, a supergiant fast…
Primordial black holes (PBHs) have been proposed to explain at least a portion of dark matter. Observations have put strong constraints on PBHs in terms of the fraction of dark matter which they can represent, $f_{\rm PBH}$, across a wide…