Potential Direct Single-Star Mass Measurement
Abstract
We analyze the lightcurve of the microlensing event OGLE-2003-BLG-175/MOA-2003-BLG-45 and show that it has two properties that, when combined with future high resolution astrometry, could lead to a direct, accurate measurement of the lens mass. First, the lightcurve shows clear signs of distortion due to the Earth's accelerated motion, which yields a measurement of the projected Einstein radius rE. Second, from precise astrometric measurements, we show that the blended light in the event is coincident with the microlensed source to within about 15 mas. This argues strongly that this blended light is the lens and hence opens the possibility of directly measuring the lens-source relative proper motion μ and so the mass M=(c2/4G)μ tE rE, where tE is the measured Einstein timescale. While the lightcurve-based measurement of rE is, by itself, severely degenerate, we show that this degeneracy can be completely resolved by measuring the direction of proper motion μ.
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