Fast computation of quadrupole and hexadecapole approximations in microlensing with a single point-source evaluation
Abstract
The exoplanet detection rate from gravitational microlensing has grown significantly in recent years thanks to a great enhancement of resources and improved observational strategy. Current observatories include ground-based wide-field and/or robotic world-wide networks of telescopes, as well as space-based observatories such as satellites Spitzer or Kepler/K2. This results in a large quantity of data to be processed and analysed, which is a challenge for modelling codes because of the complexity of the parameter space to be explored and the intensive computations required to evaluate the models. In this work, I present a method that allows to compute the quadrupole and hexadecapole approximations of the finite-source magnification with more efficiency than previously available codes, with routines about six times and four times faster, respectively. The quadrupole takes just about twice the time of a point-source evaluation, which advocates for generalizing its use to large portions of the light curves. The corresponding routines are available as open-source python codes.
- Publication:
-
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
- Pub Date:
- July 2017
- DOI:
- 10.1093/mnras/stx849
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1703.03600
- Bibcode:
- 2017MNRAS.468.3993C
- Keywords:
-
- gravitational lensing: micro;
- methods: numerical;
- planets and satellites: detection;
- Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics;
- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- Published in MNRAS (7 pages, 2 figures, 1 table). Open source codes available on GitHub (cf. reference in the paper)