Magnification Bias in Galactic Microlensing Searches

Abstract

It is shown that a significant amount of detectable gravitational microlensing events that could potentially be found by MAssively Parallel Photometry (MAPP) projects (such as the MACHO, EROS and OGLE collaborations) will occur for stars too dim to be easily noticed individually by these projects. This is the result of a large magnification bias effect, a bias of including high magnification events in any flux-limited sample. The probability of detecting these events may be as high as 2.3 times the lensing probability of stars currently being monitored by MAPP collaborations.

in press: ApJ, no figures

Cited by in corpus (11)

• The MACHO project: Microlensing Optical Depth towards the Galactic Bulge from Difference Image Analysis
• Microlensing of Blended Stellar Images
• On the Afterglow of the X-Ray Flash of July 23 2003: Photometric evidence for an off-axis Gamma-Ray Burst with an associated Supernova?
• Difference Image Analysis of Galactic Microlensing I. Data Analysis
• The Effects of Amplification Bias in Gravitational Microlensing Experiments
• Analytic Relations between the Observed Gravitational Microlensing Parameters With and Without the Effect of Blending
• Correction for Blending Problem in Gravitational Microlensing Events by Using Hubble Space Telescope
• An Additional Application of the Space Interferometry Mission to Gravitational Microlensing Experiments
• The Cosmological Signatures and Flux Distribution of Gamma-Ray Bursts with a Broad Luminosity Distribution
• Towards Locating the Brightest Microlensing Events on the Sky
• Effect of Binary Source Companions on the Microlensing Optical Depth Determination toward the Galactic Bulge Field