A Second-Order Moment of Microlensing Variability as a Novel Tool in Extragalactic Research

TL;DR

This paper introduces a second-order moment of microlensing variability as a new tool to constrain quasar properties, demonstrating its effectiveness through simulations and real X-ray data, and revealing potential planetary mass microlenses.

Contribution

It formulates a novel methodology using second-order moments to estimate source sizes from microlensing data, applicable to multi-epoch observations and tested on real and simulated lenses.

Findings

Method accurately detects source sizes around 0.1 Einstein radii.

Application to real data suggests microlensing by planetary mass objects.

The approach leverages multi-epoch data without significant computational increase.

Abstract

We define a second-order moment of the observational differential microlensing curves that can be used to impose constraints on physical properties of lensed quasars. We show that this quantity is sensitive both to variations in the source size and the deflector mass. We formulize a methodology to recover the source size from the observational measurements when the mass spectrum is fixed. As a case study, we test it with a sample of four quadruple lenses, both in simulated scenarios and with real data from the $\textit{Chandra X-ray Observatory}$. In our simulations with a uniform stellar population the method works best to detect sources around $0.1$ Einstein radii, giving correct upper/lower limits for much smaller/bigger sizes without requiring a big leap in additional computational effort as compared to a single-epoch approach, yet taking advantage of multi-epoch information. We apply the method to a small sample of X-ray data from four objects assuming a range of star masses, and obtain a degeneracy relation between the source size and deflector mass. Combined with previous estimates for the size of the X-ray corona, the degeneracy relation suggests that X-ray microlensing is mainly induced by planetary mass objects.