2023/10/29 by Andrew Gould, Gould, Andrew
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing #Advanced Measurement and Metrology Techniques #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.19164
openalex publication_date 2023/10/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
I show that industrial-scale mass measurement of isolated black holes (BHs) can be achieved by combining a high-cadence, wide-field microlensing survey such as KMTNet, observations from a parallax satellite in solar orbit, and VLTI GRAVITY+ interferometry. I show that these can yield precision measurements of microlens parallaxes down to π\rm E∼ 0.01 and Einstein radii down to θ\rm E∼ 1 mas. These limits correspond to BH masses M∼ 12 M_\odot, deep in the Galactic bulge, with lens-source separations of DLS∼ 0.6 kpc, and they include all BHs in the Galactic disk. I carry out detailed analyses of simulations that explore many aspects of the measurement process, including the decisions on whether to carry out VLTI measurements for each long-event candidate. I show that the combination of ground-based and space-based light curves of BH events will automatically exclude the spurious "large parallax" solutions that arise from the standard (Refsdal 1966) analysis, except for the high-magnification events, for which other methods can be applied. The remaining two-fold degeneracy can always be broken by conducting a second VLTI measurement, and I show how to identify the relatively rare cases that this is required.