The Effects of Amplification Bias in Gravitational Microlensing Experiments

Abstract

Although a source star is fainter than the detection limit imposed by crowding, it is still possible to detect an event if the star is located in the seeing disk of a bright star is and gravitationally amplified: amplification bias. Using a well-constrained luminosity function, I show that $\sim 40\%$ of events detected toward the Galactic bulge are affected by amplification bias and the optical depth might be overestimated by a factor $\sim 1.7$. In addition, I show that if one takes amplification bias into consideration, the observed time scale distribution matches significantly better, especially in the short time-scale region, with the distribution expected from a mass-spectrum model in which lenses are composed of the known stellar population plus an additional population of brown dwarfs than it is without the effect of the amplification bias.