GEO and LEO: The Final Frontier for Plutonic FFP Parallax
Abstract
I show that microlens parallaxes, , can be derived for free-floating planets (FFPs) with masses down to that of Pluto, by combining observations from a satellite in geosynchronous (GEO) orbit with another observatory that is on or near Earth's surface, i.e., either ground-based or in low Earth orbit (LEO). Because these low-mass FFPs typically have measurements of the angular Einstein radius, , from finite-source effects, such measurements directly yield the FFP mass where is a physical constant. Such Earth-GEO measurements almost perfectly complement Earth-L2 measurements, which extend to higher FFP mass and greater FFP distance. LEO-only observations can yield mass measurement at even smaller FFP mass and nearer FFP distances. I discuss methods for breaking the Refsdal (1966) two-fold degeneracy in .
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2407.21696,
title = {GEO and LEO: The Final Frontier for Plutonic FFP Parallax},
author = {Andrew Gould},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.21696},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
15 pages, 3 figures