Related papers: Ground-based Microlensing Surveys
In the near-future, dedicated telescopes observe Earth-like exoplanets in reflected light, allowing their characterization. Because of the huge distances, every exoplanet will be a single pixel, but temporal variations in its spectral flux…
We demonstrate that gravitational lensing can be used to discover and study planets in the habitable zones of nearby dwarf stars. If appropriate software is developed, a new generation of monitoring programs will automatically conduct a…
The recent discovery of a staggering diversity of planets beyond the Solar System has brought with it a greatly expanded search space for habitable worlds. The Kepler exoplanet survey has revealed that most planets in our interstellar…
Moderately close binaries are a special class of targets for planet searches. From a theoretical standpoint, their hospitality to giant planets is uncertain and debated. From an observational standpoint, many of these systems present…
We revisit the possibility of detecting an extrasolar planet around a background star as it crosses the fold caustic of a foreground binary lens. During such an event, the planet's flux can be magnified by a factor of ~100 or more. The…
Over the past three decades instruments on the ground and in space have discovered thousands of planets outside the solar system. These observations have given rise to an astonishingly detailed picture of the demographics of short-period…
Planet detection through microlensing is usually limited by a well-known degeneracy in the Einstein timescale $t_E$, which prevents mass and distance of the lens to be univocally determined. It has been shown that a satellite in…
An LSST-like survey of the Galactic plane (deep images every 3-4 days) could probe the Galactic distribution of planets by two distinct methods: gravitational microlensing of planets beyond the snow line and transits by planets very close…
Super-Earths and sub-Neptunes represent the most common class of exoplanets discovered to date in our galaxy, yet they have no direct analogues in the Solar System. Since 2014, researchers within the NCCR PlanetS have made significant…
We survey the methods proposed in the literature for detecting moons of extrasolar planets in terms of their ability to distinguish between prograde and retrograde moon orbits, an important tracer of moon formation channel. We find that…
The discovery of rings around extrasolar planets ("exorings") is one of the next breakthroughs in exoplanetary research. Previous studies have explored the feasibility of detecting exorings with present and future photometric sensitivities…
A measurement by microlensing of the planetary mass function of planets with masses ranging from 5M_E to 10M_J and orbital radii from 0.5 to 10 AU was reported recently. A strategy for extending the mass range down to (1-3)M_E is proposed…
The next generation of telescopes will yield a substantial increase in the availability of high-resolution spectroscopic data for thousands of exoplanets. The sheer volume of data and number of planets to be analyzed greatly motivate the…
We detect a cold, terrestrial planet in a binary-star system using gravitational microlensing. The planet has low mass (2 Earth masses) and lies projected at $a_{\perp,ph}$ ~ 0.8 astronomical units (AU) from its host star, similar to the…
The gravitational microlensing technique is most sensitive to planets in a Jupiter-like orbit and has detected more than 200 planets. However, only a few wide-orbit ($s > 2$) microlensing planets have been discovered, where $s$ is the…
We study the possibility to detect extrasolar planets in M31 through pixel-lensing observations. Using a Monte Carlo approach, we select the physical parameters of the binary lens system, a star hosting a planet, and we calculate the…
The search for habitable exoplanets and life beyond the Solar System is one of the most compelling scientific opportunities of our time. Nevertheless, the high cost of building facilities that can address this topic and the keen public…
High contrast direct imaging of exoplanets can provide many important observables, including measurements of the orbit, spectra that probe the lower layers of the atmosphere, and phase variations of the planet, but cannot directly measure…
Interstellar radar is a potential intermediate step between passive observation of exoplanets and interstellar exploratory missions. Compared to passive observation, it has the traditional advantages of radar astronomy. It can measure…
In the last few years astronomical surveys have expanded the reach of planetary science into the realm of small and dense extrasolar worlds. These share a number of characteristics with the terrestrial and icy planetary objects of the Solar…