SIMBAD references

The declining light curve of the optical afterglow of gamma-ray burst (GRB) GRB000301C showed rapid variability with one particularly bright feature at about t-t₀=3.8d. This event was interpreted as gravitational microlensing by Garnavich, Loeb & Stanek and subsequently used to derive constraints on the structure of the GRB optical afterglow. In this paper, we use these structural parameters to calculate the probability of such a microlensing event in a realistic scenario, where all compact objects in the universe are associated with observable galaxies. For GRB000301C at a redshift of z=2.04, the a posteriori probability for a microlensing event with an amplitude of Δm≥0.95mag (as observed) is 0.7 per cent (2.7 per cent) for the most plausible scenario of a flat Λ-dominated Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) universe with Ω_m=0.3 and a fraction f∗=0.2 (1.0) of dark matter in the form of compact objects. If we lower the magnification threshold to Δm≥0.10mag, the probabilities for microlensing events of GRB afterglows increase to 17 per cent (57 per cent). We emphasize that this low probability for a microlensing signature of almost 1mag does not exclude that the observed event in the afterglow light curve of GRB000301C was caused by microlensing, especially in light of the fact that a galaxy was found within 2arcsec from the GRB. In that case, however, a more robust upper limit on the a posteriori probability of ~5 per cent is found. It does show, however, that it will not be easy to create a large sample of strong GRB afterglow microlensing events for statistical studies of their physical conditions on microarcsec scales.