Type: Talk
Session: Microlensing
Author: Katarzyna Kruszyńska

Abstract: While Rubin Observatory's LSST is expected to discover thousands of microlensing events, the average cadence is likely to be too low to characterize planetary and stellar binary events. However, it is still possible to detect interesting events while in progress and Rubin's real-time alerts mean that other facilities can then follow up on these events. The OMEGA Key Project is a large program realized using the Las Cumbres Observatory network of robotic telescopes. It focuses on following up on microlensing events that could reveal more information about the Milky Way's hidden populations: planets, brown dwarfs and isolated black holes. The program has successfully delivered higher cadence photometry and spectroscopy in response to microlensing event alerts, not only from surveys such as OGLE and MOA but also by Gaia Science Alerts (GSA). This allowed for probing not only towards the Galactic bulge, which is densely observed by microlensing surveys but also a wider region of the Galactic plane. Gaia, an ESA mission, is focused on obtaining precise positions, parallaxes and velocities of one billion stars in the Galaxy, and its observation strategy is also not optimized for microlensing. The OMEGA Key Project has successfully filled gaps in the survey time series for $>100$ Gaia discoveries, identifying and constraining anomalous and second-order features critical to modelling the event. The OMEGA Key Project built a TOM Toolkit customized for microlensing science and is integrated with the Rubin alert brokers. Here, I will present this project and its capabilities as a path-finder for the Rubin Observatories Legacy Survey of Space and Time follow-up.