Related papers: An Additional Application of the Space Interferome…
The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), with its launch date planned for 2005, has as its goal astrometry with ~ 1 micro-arcsecond accuracy for stars as faint as 20th mag. If the SIM lives to expectations it can be used to measure…
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…
This paper analyses the relativistic stellar aberration requirements for the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). We address the issue of general relativistic deflection of light by the massive self-gravitating bodies. Specifically, we…
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…
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…
Gravitational waves (GWs) can be deflected, similarly to electromagnetic (EM) waves, by massive objects through the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. The importance of gravitational lensing for GW astronomy is becoming increasingly…
The uncertainty of the lens mass can be substantially reduced if it is determined from the lens proper motion obtained from astrometric measurements of the source image centroid shifts, $\vdelta\vtheta_c$, by using high precision…
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…
It has been argued that the power spectrum of the anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) may be effectively degenerate, namely that the observable spectrum does not determine a unique set of cosmological parameters. We…
The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) is a space-based long-baseline optical interferometer for precision astrometry. One of the primary objectives of the SIM instrument is to accurately determine the directions to a grid of stars,…
Astrometric observations of microlensing events were originally proposed to determine the lens proper motion with which the physical parameters of lenses can be better constrained. In this proceeding, we demonstrate that besides this…
The biggest uncertainty in determining microlensing parameters comes from the blending of source star images because the current experiments are being carried out toward very dense star fields: the Galactic bulge and Magellanic Clouds. The…
Gravitational lensing offers unique opportunities to learn about the astrophysical origin of distant sources, the abundance of intervening objects acting as lenses, and gravity and cosmology in general. However, all this information can…
Due to the high efficiency of planet detections, current microlensing planet searches focus on high-magnification events. High-magnification events are sensitive to remote binary companions as well and thus a sample of wide-separation…
The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) is the instrument of choice when it comes to observing astrometric microlensing events where nearby, usually high-proper-motion stars (``lenses''), pass in front of more distant stars (``sources'').…
We study the impact of relativistic gravitational deflection of light on the accuracy of future Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). We estimate the deflection angles caused by the monopole, quadrupole and octupole components of…
Gravitational lensing, caused by matter perturbations along the line-of-sight to the last scattering surface, can modify the shape of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy power spectrum. We discuss the detectability of lensing…
Astrometric measurements of microlensing events can in principle determine both the "parallax" \tilde r_E and the "proper motion" \mu of an individual event which (combined with the Einstein time scale t_E) in turn yield the mass, distance,…
Recently, there have been reports of various types of degeneracies in the interpretation of planetary signals induced by planetary caustics. In this work, we check whether such degeneracies persist in the case of well-covered signals by…
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…