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Distance of a Microlensing Event Measured For the First Time

Posted by timothy on from the just-like-being-there dept.

astroengine writes For the first time, astronomers have combined the observational power of a ground-based survey with a space telescope to measure the distance to a stellar-mass object that was detected through a chance microlensing event. In a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, astronomer Jennifer Yee of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), Mass., led the study focusing on the detection of the microlensing event called "OGLE-2014-BLG-0939." Detected by the 1.3 meter Warsaw Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and alerted through the Optical Gravitational Lens Experiment (OGLE) community on May 28, 2014, Yee's team seized the opportunity to use NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to focus on the transient brightening. Both telescopes recorded a light curve of the event and was therefore able to derive the distance to the dark lens.

2 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Re:My thoughts by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    then punished those beings that failed to believe in it, said deity would be sick and twisted, not deserving of worship but in need of intense psychotherapy.

    Look at it from this perspective: Humans may someday be able to control or make sub-universes and/or simulations of universes. We'd then become deities from the perspective of any beings in such worlds. Thus, the idea of a deity is not so far fetched. It's within the realm of scientific speculation.

    Further, some of the humans who end up making or are put in charge of some of those worlds may turn out to be sadistic jerks. Thus, the situation you described is not entirely unrealistic. Acting "deities" could exist and could end up being jerks.

    That being said, I don't trust the humans of our Earth to get the traits of any such deity right, IF we are under such an overlord. They'd likely make up crap about the deity if they had contact with him/her/it. Or, it would be indistinguishable from tales of fake encounters.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  2. 20 years late by mbone · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is known as microlensing parallax, and was first done 1995. Parallax breaks lensing degeneracies, enabling the determination of distance,

    Now, you may quibble about this particular distance measurement, but it's been done for 20 years now. Routinely. And, yes, its been done from space before too.

    My guess is that some needed qualifiers were lost between the astronomer's mouth and the headline writers keyboard, but it ain't first.