Gravitational Microlensing By Random Motion Of Stars: Movie and Analysis of Light Curves

Abstract

We present a quantitative analysis of the effect of microlensing caused by random motion of individual stars in a galaxy lensing a background quasar. We calculate a large number of magnification patterns for positions of the stars slightly offset from one frame to the next, and thus obtain light curves for fixed quasar and galaxy positions, only due to the change in the relative star positions. These light curves are analyzed to identify microlensing events, which are then classified with respect to height, duration, and slope. These random motion microlensing events are compared with the corresponding ones caused by the bulk motion of the galaxy.

We find that microlensing events produced by random motion of stars are shorter, steeper, and more frequent than bulk motion events, assuming the velocity dispersion of the stars equals the bulk velocity of the galaxy. The reason for this difference is that in the case of random motion, caustics can move with an arbitrarily high velocity, producing very short events, whereas in the comparison case for bulk motion a microlensing event can never be shorter than it takes a fold caustic, which moves with the velocity of the lensing galaxy projected onto the quasar plane, to cross the quasar. An accompanying video illustrates these results. For three different values of the surface mass density κ, it shows time sequences of 1000 magnification patterns for slowly changing lens positions, together with the positions and velocity vectors of the microlensing stars. The full paper including the video can be found in Wambsganss & Kundić (1995). A short version of the video is available as an MPEG movie under anonymous ftp at astro.princeton.edu, in the directory jkw/microlensing/moving_stars.