Spitzer Observations of OGLE-2015-BLG-1212 Reveal a New Path toward Breaking Strong Microlens Degeneracies

Creators: Bozza, V.; Calchi Novati, S.; Beichman, C.; Carey, S.; OGLE Group; Spitzer Team; MOA Group; KMTNet Group; MINDSTEP Group; WISE Group

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Abstract

Spitzer microlensing parallax observations of OGLE-2015-BLG-1212 decisively break a degeneracy between planetary and binary solutions that is somewhat ambiguous when only ground-based data are considered. Only eight viable models survive out of an initial set of 32 local minima in the parameter space. These models clearly indicate that the lens is a stellar binary system possibly located within the bulge of our Galaxy, ruling out the planetary alternative. We argue that several types of discrete degeneracies can be broken via such space-based parallax observations.

Additional Information

© 2016 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2016 January 8; accepted 2016 February 9; published 2016 March 21. The OGLE Team thanks Profs. M. Kubiak and G. Pietrzyński, former members of the OGLE team, for their contribution to the collection of the OGLE photometric data over the past years. The OGLE project has received funding from the National Science Centre, Poland, grant MAESTRO 2014/14/A/ST9/00121 to A.U. Work by Y.S. and C.B.H. was supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities through a contract with NASA. Work by C.H. was supported by Creative Research Initiative Program (2009-0081561) of National Research Foundation of Korea. J.C.Y., A.G., and S.C.N. acknowledge support by JPL grant 1500811. Work by W.Z. and A.G. was supported by NSF AST 1516842. Work by J.C.Y. was performed under contract with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) funded by NASA through the Sagan Fellowship Program executed by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. T.S. acknowledges the financial support from the JSPS, JSPS23103002, JSPS24253004, and JSPS26247023. The MOA project is supported by grants JSPS25103508 and JSPS23340064. Based on data collected by MiNDSTEp with the Danish 1.54 m telescope at the ESO La Silla Observatory.

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