English

MASADA: From Microlensing Planet Mass-Ratio Function to Planet Mass Function

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2022-09-27 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

Using current technology, gravitational microlensing is the only method that can measure planet masses over the full parameter space of planet and stellar-host masses and at a broad range of planet-host separations. I present a comprehensive program to transform the 150\sim 150 planet/host mass ratio measurements from the first 6 full seasons of the KMTNet survey into planet mass measurements via late-time adaptive optics (AO) imaging on 30m-class telescopes. This program will enable measurements of the overall planet mass function, the planet frequency as a function of Galactic environment and the planet mass functions within different environments. I analyze a broad range of discrete and continuous degeneracies as well as various false positives and false negatives, and I present a variety of methods to resolve these. I analyze the propagation from measurement uncertainties to mass and distance errors and show that these present the greatest difficulties for host masses 0.13(M/M)0.40.13\lesssim(M/M_\odot)\lesssim 0.4, i.e., fully convective stars supported by the ideal gas law, and for very nearby hosts. While work can begin later this decade using AO on current telescopes, of order 90% of the target sample must await 30m-class AO. I present extensive tables with information that is useful to plan observations of more than 100 of these planets and provide additional notes for a majority of these. Applying the same approach to two earlier surveys with 6 and 8 planets, respectively, I find that 11 of these 14 planets already have mass measurements by a variety of techniques. These provide suggestive evidence that planet frequency may be higher for nearby stars, DL4D_L\lesssim 4 kpc compared to those in or near the Galactic bulge. Finally, I analyze the prospects for making the planet mass-function measurement for the case that current astronomical capabilities are seriously degraded.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.12501,
  title  = {MASADA: From Microlensing Planet Mass-Ratio Function to Planet Mass Function},
  author = {Andrew Gould},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.12501},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

93 pages, 10 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T02:05:01.439Z