Related papers: Gravitational Microlensing with the Space Interfer…
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…
I investigate the prospects for using the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) to measure the masses of nearby stars from their astrometric deflection of more distant sources, as originally suggested by Paczynski and by Miralda-Escude. I…
Microlensing events are now regularly being detected by monitoring the flux of a large number of potential sources and measuring the combined magnification of the images. This phenomenon could also be detected directly from the…
Gravitational microlensing of quasars by stars in external galaxies can introduce fluctuations in the centroid of the ``point-like'' macro--images. The induced shifts are extremely small, on micro--arcsecond scales, below the limits of…
Context: Astrometric gravitational microlensing is an excellent tool to determine the mass of stellar objects. Using precise astrometric measurements of the lensed position of a background source in combination with accurate predictions of…
We identify stars with large proper motions that are potential candidates for the astrometric microlensing effect during the Gaia mission i.e. between 2012 and 2019. The effect allows a precise measurement of the mass of a single star that…
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…
Context. Astrometric gravitational microlensing can be used to determine the mass of a single star (the lens) with an accuracy of a few percent. To do so, precise measurements of the angular separations between lens and background star with…
We propose a novel means of directly measuring cosmological distances using scintillated microlensing of fast radio bursts (FRBs). In standard strong lensing measurements of cosmic expansion, the main source of systematic uncertainty lies…
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…
GAIA is the ``super-Hipparcos'' survey satellite selected as a Cornerstone 6 mission by the European Space Agency. GAIA can measure microlensing by the small excursions of the light centroid that occur during events. The all-sky…
Gravitational microlensing has the potential to provide direct gravitational masses of single, free-floating brown dwarfs, independent of evolutionary and atmospheric models. The proper motions and parallaxes of nearby brown dwarfs can be…
SIM PlanetQuest (Space Interferometry Mission) is a space-borne Michelson interferometer for precision stellar astrometry, with a nine meter baseline, currently slated for launch in 2015. One of the principal science goals is the…
Astrometric detection of a stellar wobble on the plane of the sky will provide us a next breakthrough in searching extrasolar planets. The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) is expected to achieve a high-precision astrometry as accurate as…
Using the astrometry of microlensing events we study the effect of angular momentum as compared to that of the parallax. For a rotating lens it is shown that the effect of the angular momentum deviates the center of images from that in the…
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…
Gravitational microlensing is a new technique for studying the surfaces of distant stars. A point mass lens, usually a low-mass star from the disk, will typically resolve the surface of a red giant in the Galactic bulge, as well as amplify…
The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) will observe sources in crowded fields. Recent work has shown that source crowding can induce significant positional errors in SIM's astrometric measurements, even for targets many magnitudes brighter…
In this article we review the astrophysical application of gravitational microlensing. After introducing the history of gravitational lensing, we present the key equations and concept of microlensing. The most frequent microlensing events…
The accuracy of position measurements on stellar targets with the future Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) will be limited not only by photon noise and by the properties of the instrument (design, stability, etc.) and the overall…