Gaia essay 84: Gaia's microlensing discoveries (Michael Perryman, 8 August 2022)

This essay discusses the detection of gravitational microlensing events by the Gaia mission, a phenomenon where the gravity of a foreground object bends light from a background source, causing temporary brightening. While many microlensing discoveries have come from ground-based surveys, Gaia's unique capabilities, including high photometric accuracy and all-sky coverage, contribute significantly. The text details the process used to identify microlensing events within the extensive Gaia Data Release 3 dataset, which involved sifting through billions of light curves to find single brightening episodes. Ultimately, this systematic search, combined with analysis of known events, led to the identification of hundreds of microlensing events, many located towards the galactic bulge. The essay also highlights examples of newly discovered and previously known events found within the Gaia data.

This audio conversation has been created from the original essay (www.michaelperryman.co.uk) using the AI conversion provided by Google NotebookLM, April 2025. Animation: artist impression of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, based on data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope (ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

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