Towards 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 time scale of a year, a star 15th magnitude or brighter should undergo a detectable gravitational lens amplification. Detecting and studying the microlensing event rate among the brightest 10${}^8$ 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.

19 pages, 4 figures, accepted by ApJ

References in corpus (1)

• Bright Lenses and Optical Depth

Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Tile or Stare? Cadence and Sky Monitoring Observing Strategies that Maximize the Number of Discovered Transients
• Observation of the first gravitational microlensing event in a sparse stellar field : the Tago event
• Black Holes and Host Galaxies of NLS1s
• Frequency Limits on Naked-Eye Optical Transients Lasting from Minutes to Years