Related papers: Additional Information from Astrometric Gravitatio…
If stars at the lower end of the main sequence are responsible for the microlensing events observed in the Galactic bulge, then light from the lensing star contributes to the observed brightness. The background and lensing stars generally…
Over the past decade, microlensing has developed into a powerful tool to study stellar astrophysics, especially stellar atmospheres, stellar masses, and binarity. I review this progress. Stellar atmospheres can be probed whenever the source…
In this paper, we demonstrate the severity of the degeneracy between the microlens-parallax and lens-orbital effects by presenting the analysis of the gravitational binary-lens event OGLE-2015-BLG-0768. Despite the obvious deviation from…
In current microlensing experiments, the information about the physical parameters of individual lenses are obtained from the Einstein timescales. However, the nature of MACHOs is still very uncertain despite the large number of detected…
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…
A major problem in the interpretation of microlensing events is that the only measured quantity, the Einstein time scale t_E, is a degenerate combination of the three quantities one would like to know, the mass, distance, and speed of the…
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.…
Gravitational microlensing is unique in detecting binary black (BH) holes with wide (a few au) separations. Models predict that about $1\%$ of microlensing binaries should be due to binary BHs, and yet zero has been robustly identified.…
The light deflection of one component of a binary system due to the gravitational field of the other component is investigated. While this relativistic effect has not been observed thus far, the question arises that whether this effect…
An extrasolar planet can be detected via microlensing from the perturbation it makes in the smooth lensing light curve of the primary. In addition to the conventional photometric microlensing, astrometric observation of the center-of-light…
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…
A comprehensive new approach is presented for deriving probability densities of physical properties characterizing lens or source that constitute an observed galactic microlensing event. While previously encountered problems are overcome,…
Despite the suspected binarity for a significant fraction of Galactic lenses, the current photometric surveys detected binary microlensing events only for a small fraction of the total events. The detection efficiency is especially low for…
Gravitational microlensing events are powerful tools for the study of stellar populations. In particular, they can be used to discover and study a variety of binary systems. A large number of binary lenses have already been found through…
The gravitational fields of astrophysical bodies bend the light around them, creating multiple paths along which light from a distant source can arrive at Earth. Measuring the difference in photon arrival time along these different paths…
Astrometric observations of microlensing events can be used to obtain important information about lenses. During these events, the shift of the position of the multiple image centroid with respect to the source star location can be…
Gravitational lensing events provide unique opportunities to discover and study planetary systems and binaries. Here we build on previous work to explore the role that orbital motion can play in both identifying and learning more about…
We consider the feasibility of directly observing gravitational microlensing in extra-galactic sources, whose stars are not generally resolved. This precludes use of the simple optical depth to microlensing formulation, which is applicable…
Ongoing microlensing surveys have already yielded more than five hundred microlensing events, most of which have been identified in real-time. In this review I present the basic theory and observational status of these surveys. I highlight…
Microlensing observations have now become a useful tool in searching for non--luminous astrophysical compact objects (brown dwarfs, faint stars, neutron stars, black holes and even planets). Originally conceived for establishing whether the…