Toward Locating the Brightest Microlensing Events on the Sky
Abstract
It is estimated that a star brighter than visual magnitude 17 is undergoing a detectable gravitational microlensing event, somewhere on the sky, at any given time. It is assumed that both lenses and sources are normal stars drawn from a standard Bahcall-Soneira model of our Galaxy. Furthermore, over the timescale of 1 yr, a star of 15th magnitude or brighter should undergo a detectable gravitational lens amplification. Detecting and studying the microlensing event rate among the brightest 108 stars could yield a better understanding of Galactic stellar and dark matter distributions. Diligent tracking of bright microlensing events with even small telescopes might detect planets orbiting these stellar lenses.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal
- Pub Date:
- December 1998
- DOI:
- 10.1086/306474
- arXiv:
- arXiv:astro-ph/9807096
- Bibcode:
- 1998ApJ...509...39N
- Keywords:
-
- COSMOLOGY: DARK MATTER;
- COSMOLOGY: GRAVITATIONAL LENSING;
- Cosmology: Dark Matter;
- Cosmology: Gravitational Lensing;
- Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 19 pages, 4 figures, accepted by ApJ