Gravitational Microlensing - Observing Microlensing

Observing Microlensing

In practice, because the alignment needed is so precise and difficult to predict, microlensing is very rare. Events, therefore, are generally found with surveys, which photometrically monitor tens of millions of potential source stars, every few days for several years. Dense background fields suitable for such surveys are nearby galaxies, such as the Magellanic Clouds and the Andromeda galaxy, and the Milky Way bulge. In each case, the lens population studied comprises the objects between Earth and the source field: for the bulge, the lens population is the Milky Way disk stars, and for external galaxies, the lens population is the Milky Way halo, as well as objects in the other galaxy itself. The density, mass, and location of the objects in these lens populations determines the frequency of microlensing along that line of sight, which is characterized by a value known as the optical depth due to microlensing. (This is not to be confused with the more common meaning of optical depth, although it shares some properties.) The optical depth is, roughly speaking, the average fraction of source stars undergoing microlensing at a given time, or equivalently the probability that a given source star is undergoing lensing at a given time. The MACHO project found the optical depth toward the LMC to be 1.2×10−7 or about 1 in 8,000,000, and the optical depth toward the bulge to be 2.43×10−6 or about 1 in 400,000.

Complicating the search is the fact that for every star undergoing microlensing, there are thousands of stars changing in brightness for other reasons (about 2% of the stars in a typical source field are naturally variable stars) and other transient events (such as novae and supernovae), and these must be weeded out to find true microlensing events. After a microlensing event in progress has been identified, the monitoring program that detects it often alerts the community to its discovery, so that other specialized programs may follow the event more intensively, hoping to find interesting deviations from the typical light curve. This is because these deviations – particularly ones due to exoplanets – require hourly monitoring to be identified, which the survey programs are unable to provide while still searching for new events. The question of how to prioritize events in progress for detailed followup with limited observing resources is very important for microlensing researchers today.