VVV MICROLENSING EVENTS, CURRENT STATUS AND FUTURE WORK

A microlensing event occurs when an object passes near the line sight of a star from earth to a background star generating an apparent increase in brightness. It can be used to detect objects that range from the mass of a planet to the mass of a star, regardless of the light they emit. We searched for microlensing events in the innermost area of the Galactic bulge using the VVV Survey near-IR data. We discovered a total sample of N=906 events within an area covering ~30 deg^2 between the years 2010 and 2015 (Navarro et al. 2017 and Navarro et al. 2019). We used the near-IR Color-Magnitude and Color-Color Diagram to select events with red-clump sources to analyze the extinction properties of the sample in the central region of the Galactic plane and minor axis (Navarro et al. 2018). The timescale distribution and its dependence in the longitude and latitude axis are presented along with the efficiency analysis to correct those distributions. The minor axis shows a steeper distribution as we approach to the galactic center. This is the first time we can measure the rate of microlensing events down to the innermost areas of the Milky Way. We also detected light curves that do not follow the simple microlensing model and show a binary systems or parallax effect.

Speaker: 
Gabriela Navarro
Place: 
KIAA 1st meeting room
Time: 
Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - 12:00PM to Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - 1:00PM