A Spectroscopic Method to Measure Macho Proper Motions

A Massive Compact Halo Object (Macho) that lenses a background star will magnify different parts of the rotating stellar disk by varying amounts. The differential magnification will cause a shift in the centroid of the star’s spectral lines during the lensing event. The shift is proportional to the ratio of the stellar radius to the projected separation of the Macho from the star. It therefore provides a direct measure of the Einstein ring radius, and so also a measure of the Macho’s proper motion (angular speed). This measurement can remove some of the degeneracy between mass, distance to the lens, and transverse velocity that exists in the interpretation of results from ongoing microlensing experiments, and is an independent test of the lensing nature of the event. We show that using the high precision attainable by stellar radial velocity measurements, it is possible to measure proper motions for ∼ 10% of Machos that lens A-stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), i.e. ∼ 7% of the type of relatively high-magnification events that have been reported to date. If this proper-motion measurement were combined with a parallax measurement of the “reduced velocity”, then the Macho mass, distance, speed, and direction could each be separately determined. The shift can be measured for ∼ 20% of the A-star events generated by Machos in the dark halo of the LMC. This in turn would provide a measurement of the fraction of LMC vs. Galactic Macho events. Subject Headings: spectroscopy – dark matter – gravitational lensing – Magellanic Clouds