Abstract
The observation of microlensing events towards the Large Magellanic Cloud and Galactic Bulge discovers a new population of our Galaxy which is that of dark bodies with masses of the order of 0.1M ⊙. Astronomy has now a unique ability: one can use the microlensing as a space telescope with extremely high angular resolution. Here we discuss the opportunity of the application of this ability to observation of close binaries. Stars in a binary system move around their barycenter and as a result the apparent motion is modulated by binary motion. The light curve of this microlensing event becomes nonsymmetrical. If a binary has two stars with different spectral types, one can expect significant variation of color during microlensing effect. Accurate light curves for some typical binaries have been calculated and are presented here. The total fraction of binaries in our Galaxy is around 50%. Therefore one can expect half of the microlensing events to have nonsymmetrical and wavelength depending light curves which would indicate that background star is binary. Our opinion is that the absence of these light curves are due to some selection effect. This leads to an underestimation of the density of the dark body population in our Galaxy by a factor of about two.
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Cherepashchuk, A.M., Sazhin, M.V. & Trifalenkov, I.A. Effects of gravitational microlensing of binary and multiple stars. Astrophys Space Sci 229, 265–299 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00626870
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00626870