An Isolated Microlens Observed from K2, Spitzer, and Earth

Creators: Zhu, Wei; Calchi Novati, S.; Beichman, C.; Carey, S.; OGLE Collaboration; Spitzer Team; MOA Collaboration

Abstract

We present the result of microlensing event MOA-2016-BLG-290, which received observations from the two-wheel Kepler (K2), Spitzer, as well as ground-based observatories. A joint analysis of data from K2 and the ground leads to two degenerate solutions of the lens mass and distance. This degeneracy is effectively broken once the (partial) Spitzer light curve is included. Altogether, the lens is found to be an extremely low-mass star or brown dwarf (77^(+34)_(-23) M_J) located in the Galactic bulge (6.8 ± 0.4 kpc). MOA-2016-BLG-290 is the first microlensing event for which we have signals from three well-separated (~1 au) locations. It demonstrates the power of two-satellite microlensing experiment in reducing the ambiguity of lens properties, as pointed out independently by S. Refsdal and A. Gould several decades ago.

Additional Information

© 2017 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2017 September 25; revised 2017 October 13; accepted 2017 October 13; published 2017 November 8. Work by W.Z. and A.G. were supported by NSF grant AST-1516842. Work by S.C.N. and A.G. were supported by JPL grant 1500811. R.P. acknowledges support from K2 Guest Observer program under NASA grant NNX17AF72G. Work by Y.S. was supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, administered by Universities Space Research Association through a contract with NASA. Work by C.R. was supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the Goddard Space Flight Center, administered by USRA through a contract with NASA. This Letter includes data collected by the Kepler mission. Funding for the Kepler mission is provided by the NASA Science Mission directorate. Some of the data presented in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Support for MAST for non-HST data is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science via grant NNX09AF08G and by other grants and contracts. The OGLE project has received funding from the National Science Centre, Poland, grant MAESTRO 2014/14/A/ST9/00121 to A.U. The MOA project is supported by JSPS Kakenhi grants JP24253004, JP26247023, JP16H06287, JP23340064, and JP15H00781 and by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Grant MAU1104.

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Submitted - 1709.09959.pdf

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