Discovery of a Jupiter/Saturn Analog with Gravitational Microlensing
Abstract
Searches for extrasolar planets have uncovered an astonishing diversity of planetary systems, yet the frequency of solar system analogs remains unknown. The gravitational microlensing planet search method is potentially sensitive to multiple-planet systems containing analogs of all the solar system planets except Mercury. We report the detection of a multiple-planet system with microlensing. We identify two planets with masses of ~0.71 and ~0.27 times the mass of Jupiter and orbital separations of ~2.3 and ~4.6 astronomical units orbiting a primary star of mass ~0.50 solar masses at a distance of ~1.5 kiloparsecs. This system resembles a scaled version of our solar system in that the mass ratio, separation ratio, and equilibrium temperatures of the planets are similar to those of Jupiter and Saturn. These planets could not have been detected with other techniques; their discovery from only six confirmed microlensing planet detections suggests that solar system analogs may be common.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0802.1920,
title = {Discovery of a Jupiter/Saturn Analog with Gravitational Microlensing},
author = {B. S. Gaudi and D. P. Bennett and A. Udalski and A. Gould and G. W. Christie and D. Maoz and S. Dong and J. McCormick and M. K. Szymanski and P. J. Tristram and S. Nikolaev and B. Paczynski and M. Kubiak and G. Pietrzynski and I. Soszynski and O. Szewczyk and K. Ulaczyk and L. Wyrzykowski and D. L. DePoy and C. Han and S. Kaspi and C. -U. Lee and F. Mallia and T. Natusch and R. W. Pogge and B. -G. Park and F. Abe and I. A. Bond and C. S. Botzler and A. Fukui and J. B. Hearnshaw and Y. Itow and K. Kamiya and A. V. Korpela and P. M. Kilmartin and W. Lin and K. Masuda and Y. Matsubara and M. Motomura and Y. Muraki and S. Nakamura and T. Okumura and K. Ohnishi and N. J. Rattenbury and T. Sako and To. Saito and S. Sato and L. Skuljan and D. J. Sullivan and T. Sumi and W. L. Sweatman and P. C. M. Yock and M. D. Albrow and A. Allan and J. -P. Beaulieu and M. J. Burgdorf and K. H. Cook and C. Coutures and M. Dominik and S. Dieters and P. Fouque and J. Greenhill and K. Horne and I. Steele and Y. Tsapras and B. Chaboyer and A. Crocker and S. Frank and B. Macintosh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0802.1920},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
11 pages, 2 figures, published in the 15 February 2008 issue of Science