Binary astrometric microlensing with Gaia

TL;DR

This study evaluates Gaia's capability to determine binary fractions and mass distributions of massive stellar populations in the Galaxy through astrometric microlensing, highlighting potential and limitations of the method.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed simulation-based assessment of Gaia's effectiveness in measuring binary fractions and masses of various stellar remnants via astrometric microlensing.

Findings

Gaia can detect binary signatures with 10-20% efficiency.

Estimated observable events for binary fractions around 0.1 are 6, 11, 77, and 1316 for different populations.

Mass measurement efficiencies are 0.8-9.8%, with hundreds of events allowing mass inference.

Abstract

We investigate whether Gaia can specify the binary fractions of massive stellar populations in the Galactic disk through astrometric microlensing. Furthermore, we study if some information about their mass distributions can be inferred via this method. In this regard, we simulate the binary astrometric microlensing events due to massive stellar populations according to the Gaia observing strategy by considering (a) stellar-mass black holes, (b) neutron stars, (c) white dwarfs and (d) main-sequence stars as microlenses. The Gaia efficiency for detecting the binary signatures in binary astrometric microlensing events is $\sim 10-20$ per cent. By calculating the optical depth due to the mentioned stellar populations, the number of the binary astrometric microlensing events being observed with Gaia with detectable binary signatures, for the binary fraction about 0.1, is estimated as 6, 11, 77 and 1316 respectively. Consequently, Gaia can potentially specify the binary fractions of these massive stellar populations. However, the binary fraction of black holes measured with this method has the large uncertainty owing to a low number of the estimated events. Knowing the binary fractions in massive stellar populations helps for studying the gravitational waves. Moreover, we investigate the number of massive microlenses which Gaia specifies their masses through astrometric microlensing of single lenses toward the Galactic bulge. The resulted efficiencies of measuring the mass of mentioned populations are 9.8, 2.9, 1.2 and 0.8 per cent respectively. The number of their astrometric microlensing events being observed in the Gaia era in which the lens mass can be inferred with the relative error less than 0.5 toward the Galactic bulge is estimated as 45, 34, 76 and 786 respectively.