English

Numerically studying the degeneracy problem in extreme finite-source microlensing events

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2023-04-20 v1

Abstract

Most transit microlensing events due to very low-mass lens objects suffer from extreme finite-source effects. While modeling their light curves, there is a known continuous degeneracy between their relevant lensing parameters, i.e., the source angular radius normalized to the angular Einstein radius ρ\rho_{\star}, the Einstein crossing time tEt_{\rm E}, the lens impact parameter u0u_{0}, the blending parameter, and the stellar apparent magnitude. In this work, I numerically study the origin of this degeneracy. I find that these light curves have 5 observational parameters (i.e., the baseline magnitude, the maximum deviation in the magnification factor, the Full Width at Half Maximum FWHM=2tHM\rm{FWHM}=2 t_{\rm{HM}}, the deviation from top-hat model, the time of the maximum time-derivative of microlensing light curves Tmax=tEρ2u02T_{\rm{max}}=t_{\rm E}\sqrt{\rho_{\star}^{2}-u_{0}^{2}}). For extreme finite-source microlensing events due to uniform source stars we get tHMTmaxt_{\rm{HM}}\simeq T_{\rm{max}}, and the deviation from the top-hat model tends to zero which both cause the known continuous degeneracy. When either ρ10\rho_{\star}\lesssim10 or the limb-darkening effect is considerable tHMt_{\rm{HM}}, and TmaxT_{\rm{max}} are two independent observational parameters. I use a numerical approach, i.e., Random Forests containing 100100-120120 Decision Trees, to study how these observational parameters are efficient in yielding the lensing parameters. These machine learning models find the mentioned 5 lensing parameters for finite-source microlensing events from uniform, and limb-darkened source stars with the average R2R^{2}-scores of 0.870.87, and 0.840.84, respectively. R2R^{2}-score for evaluating the lens impact parameter gets worse on adding limb darkening, and for extracting the limb-darkening coefficient itself this score falls as low as 0.670.67.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2304.09529,
  title  = {Numerically studying the degeneracy problem in extreme finite-source microlensing events},
  author = {Sedighe Sajadian},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.09529},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

10 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:10:47.813Z