Microlensing, Brown Dwarfs and GAIA
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Abstract
The GAIA satellite can precisely measure the masses of nearby brown dwarfs
and lower main sequence stars by the microlensing effect. The scientific yield
is maximised if the microlensing event is also followed with ground-based
telescopes to provide densely sampled photometry. There are two possible
strategies. First, ongoing events can be triggered by photometric or
astrometric alerts by GAIA. Second, events can be predicted using known high
proper motion stars as lenses. This is much easier, as the location and time of
an event can be forecast. Using the GAIA source density, we estimate that the
sample size of high proper motion (