Candidate Brown-dwarf Microlensing Events with Very Short Timescales and Small Angular Einstein Radii
Short-timescale microlensing events are likely to be produced by substellar brown dwarfs (BDs), but it is difficult to securely identify BD lenses based on only event timescales t{sub E} because short-timescale events can also be produced by stellar lenses with high relative lens-source proper motions. In this paper, we report three strong candidate BD-lens events found from the search for lensing events not only with short timescales (t{sub E}≲6 days) but also with very small angular Einstein radii (θ{sub E}≲0.05 mas) among the events that have been found in the 2016–2019 observing seasons. These events include MOA-2017-BLG-147, MOA-2017-BLG-241, and MOA-2019-BLG-256, in which the first two events are produced by single lenses and the last event is produced by a binary lens. From the Monte Carlo simulations of Galactic events conducted with the combined t{sub E} and θ{sub E} constraint, it is estimated that the lens masses of the individual events are 0.051{sub −0.027}{sup +0.100} M{sub ⊙}, 0.044{sub −0.023}{sup +0.090} M{sub ⊙}, and 0.046{sub −0.023}{sup +0.067} M{sub ⊙}/0.038{sub −0.019}{sup +0.056} M{sub ⊙} and the probability of the lens mass smaller than the lower limit of stars is ∼80% for all events. We point out that routine lens mass measurements of short-timescale lensing events require survey-mode space-based observations.