Related papers: Discerning Parallax Amplitude in Astrometric Micro…
Of all planet-finding techniques, microlensing is potentially the most sensitive to Earth-mass planets. However, microlensing lightcurves generically yield only the planet-star mass ratio: the mass itself is uncertain to a factor of a few.…
By combining SIM observations with ground-based photometry, one can completely solve microlensing events seen toward the Galactic bulge. One could measure the mass, distance, and transverse velocity of ~100 lenses to ~5% precision in only…
Traditional approaches to measuring the stellar mass function (MF) are fundamentally limited because objects are detected based on their luminosity, not their mass. These methods are thereby restricted to luminous and relatively nearby…
Microlensing imprints by typical stellar mass lenses on gravitational waves are challenging to identify in the LIGO and Virgo frequency band because such effects are weak. However, stellar mass lenses are generally embedded in lens galaxies…
While elementary particles are the favored candidate for the elusive dark matter, primordial black holes (PBHs) have also been considered to fill that role. Gravitational microlensing is a very well-suited tool to detect and measure the…
This is a preliminary report on the application of Difference Image Analysis (DIA) to galactic bulge images. The aim of this analysis is to increase the sensitivity to the detection of gravitational microlensing. We discuss how the DIA…
Gravitational lensing of gravitational waves (GWs) is a powerful probe of the matter distribution in the universe. Here we revisit the wave-optics effects induced by dark matter (DM) halos on the GW signals of merging massive black hole…
Due to dramatic improvements in the precision of astrometric measurements, the observation of light centroid shifts in observed stars due to intervening massive compact objects (`astrometric microlensing') will become possible in the near…
We show that distances of objects at cosmological distances can be measured directly using interferometry. Our approach to interferometric parallax comes from analysis of 4-point amplitude and intensity correlations that can be generated…
Recently, from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images of one of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) events taken 6.3 years after the original lensing measurement, Alcock et al. were able to directly image the lens. Although the first resolved…
It is shown that a significant amount of detectable gravitational microlensing events that could potentially be found by MAssively Parallel Photometry (MAPP) projects (such as the MACHO, EROS and OGLE collaborations) will occur for stars…
The detection of old neutron stars and black holes in isolation is one of the cornerstones of compact object astrophysics. Microlensing surveys may help on this purpose since the lensing mechanism is independent of the emission properties…
Observations of the Galactic bulge revealed an excess of short-timescale gravitational microlensing events that are generally attributed to a large population of free-floating or wide-orbit exoplanets. However, in recent years, some authors…
WFIRST microlensing observations will return high-precision parallaxes, sigma(pi) < 0.3 microarcsec, for the roughly 1 million stars with H<14 in its 2.8 deg^2 field toward the Galactic bulge. Combined with its 40,000 epochs of high…
We propose a new technique, which we call the lens parallax method, to determine simultaneously the redshift distribution of the faint blue galaxies and the mass distribution of foreground clusters of galaxies. The method is based on…
To determine the local dark matter density (LDMD) of the solar system is a classical problem in astronomy. Recently, a novel method of determining the LDMD from stellar distribution and vertical velocity dispersion profiles perpendicular to…
Although a source star is fainter than the detection limit imposed by crowding, it is still possible to detect an event if the star is located in the seeing disk of a bright star is and gravitationally amplified: amplification bias. Using a…
The detection of microlensing has opened the way for the development of new methods in galactic astronomy. This series of papers investigates what microlensing can teach us about the structure and shape of the dark halo. In this paper we…
We present the first space-based microlens parallax measurement of an isolated star. From the striking differences in the lightcurve as seen from Earth and from Spitzer (~1 AU to the West), we infer a projected velocity v_helio,projected ~…
The identification of strong gravitational lenses in large surveys has historically been a rather time consuming exercise. Early data from the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (Herschel-ATLAS) demonstrate that lenses can…