Constraining galactic models through parallax and astrometry of microlensing events

¹ Department of Physics, Sharif University of Technology, PO Box 11365-9161 Tehran, Iran e-mail: rahvar@sharif.edu; sima_gh@mehr.sharif.ac.ir
² Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, PO Box 19395-5531 Tehran, Iran

Received: 1 December 2004
Accepted: 30 March 2005

Abstract

Various models for the Galactic distribution of massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) have been proposed for the interpretation of microlensing toward the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). A direct way to fit the best model is by measuring the lens parameters, which can be obtained by measuring the Einstein crossing time and the parallax effect on the microlensing light curve and by astrometry of centroids of images. In this work, the theoretical distribution of these parameters is obtained for the various power-law Galactic dark halo models and MACHO mass functions (MF). For self-lensing as one of the models for the interpretation of LMC events, the maximum shift of image centroids and the parallax parameter are one order of magnitude smaller than for models with dark halos. This can be used as a test for self-lensing, although the shift of image centroids 0.02 mas for the LMC events is unlikely to be observed by the astrometric missions such as FAME, GAIA and SIM.