Additional Information from Astrometric Gravitational Microlensing Observations

Abstract

Astrometric observations of microlensing events were originally proposed to determine the lens proper motion with which the physical parameters of lenses can be better constrained. In this proceeding, we demonstrate that besides this original usage astrometric microlensing observations can be additionally used in obtaining various important information about lenses. First, we demonstrate that the lens brightness can be determined with astrometric observations, enabling one to know whether the event is caused by a bright star or a dark lens. Second, we show that with additional information from astrometric observations one can resolve the ambiguity of the photometric binary lens fit and thus uniquely determine the binary lens parameters. Finally, we propose two astrometric methods that can resolve the degeneracy in the photometric lens parallax determination. Since one can measure both the proper motion and the parallax by these methods, the lens parameters of individual events can be uniquely determined.