Candidate Brown-dwarf Microlensing Events with Very Short Timescales and Small Angular Einstein Radii

TL;DR

This paper identifies three strong candidate brown dwarf microlensing events with very short durations and small Einstein radii, estimating their masses to be below stellar thresholds, highlighting the need for space-based surveys for routine mass measurements.

Contribution

The study reports the discovery of three candidate brown dwarf lensing events with very short timescales and small Einstein radii, providing Bayesian mass estimates and emphasizing the importance of space-based observations.

Findings

Estimated lens masses are below stellar thresholds (~0.05 M_sun).

Probability of lens mass being substellar is about 80%.

Events include both single and binary lens systems.

Abstract

Short-timescale microlensing events are likely to be produced by substellar brown dwarfs (BDs), but it is difficult to securely identify BD lenses based on only event timescales $t_{\rm E}$ because short-timescale events can also be produced by stellar lenses with high relative lens-source proper motions. In this paper, we report three strong candidate BD-lens events found from the search for lensing events not only with short timescales ($t_{\rm E} \lesssim 6~{\rm days}$) but also with very small angular Einstein radii ($\theta_{\rm E}\lesssim 0.05~{\rm mas}$) among the events that have been found in the 2016--2019 observing seasons. These events include MOA-2017-BLG-147, MOA-2017-BLG-241, and MOA-2019-BLG-256, in which the first two events are produced by single lenses and the last event is produced by a binary lens. From the Bayesian analysis conducted with the combined $t_{\rm E}$ and $\theta_{\rm E}$ constraint, it is estimated that the lens masses of the individual events are $0.051^{+0.100}_{-0.027}~M_\odot$, $0.044^{+0.090}_{-0.023}~M_\odot$, and $0.046^{+0.067}_{-0.023}~M_\odot/0.038^{+0.056}_{-0.019}~M_\odot$ and the probability of the lens mass smaller than the lower limit of stars is $\sim 80\%$ for all events. We point out that routine lens mass measurements of short time-scale lensing events require survey-mode space-based observations.