Rapid Brightness Fluctuations in Q0957+561A,B: Microlensing or Seeing?

Details Rapid Brightness Fluctuations in Q0957+561A,B: Microlensing or Seeing? Rapid Brightness Fluctuations in Q0957+561A,B: Microlensing or Seeing?

May 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003apj...588..711c&link_type=abstract

The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 588, Issue 2, pp. 711-715.

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

3

Cosmology: Dark Matter, Galaxies: Halos, Cosmology: Gravitational Lensing, Methods: Data Analysis, Galaxies: Quasars: Individual: Alphanumeric: 0957+561, Techniques: Photometric

Scientific paper

We address the following question: How does one reliably distinguish rapid microlensing events from atmospheric or instrumental effects on observed brightness fluctuations of distant objects? Our approach was to do a controlled, albeit limited, experiment, the first of its kind: observe Q0957+561A,B simultaneously through filters of the same characteristics with two telescopes with comparable fields of view but separated sufficiently for atmospheric fluctuations to be independent. Over the 1998-1999 viewing season, we succeeded in obtaining simultaneous data on 14 of the 55 nights scheduled. Analysis of these data led to the following: (1) after correction for ``blending'' of the A and B images, most rapid microlensing candidate outliers disappeared, and the agreement of the photometry from the two telescopes improved to an rms difference of about 15 mmag; (2) no microlensing events of amplitude greater than 0.1 mag were observed in either data set over the entire run, nearly ruling out ~10-5 Msolar MACHOs as composing more than about half the dark matter in the lens galaxy, if the source size is <~3×1014 cm.

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