Related papers: Microlensing Detections of Planets in Binary Stell…
Recent discoveries of circumbinary planets in Kepler data show that there is a viable channel of planet formation around binary main sequence stars. Motivated by these discoveries, we have investigated the caustic structures and…
Roughly half of Solar-type planet hosts have stellar companions, so understanding how these binary companions affect the formation and evolution of planets is an important component to understanding planetary systems overall. Measuring the…
Hundreds of gravitational microlensing events have now been detected towards the Galactic bulge, with many more to come. The detection of fine structure in these events has been theorized to be an excellent way to discover extra-solar…
In the current strategy of microlensing planet searches focusing on high-magnification events, wide and close binaries pose important sources of contamination that imitates planetary signals. For the purpose of finding systematic…
Previously, planets have been detected only in the Milky Way galaxy. Here, we show that quasar microlensing provides a means to probe extragalactic planets in the lens galaxy, by studying the microlensing properties of emission close to the…
We investigate the characteristic of microlensing signals of Earth-like moons orbiting ice-giant planets. From this, we find that non-negligible satellite signals occur when the planet-moon separation is similar to or greater than the…
Are microlensing searches likely to discover planets that harbor life? Given our present state of knowledge, this is a difficult question to answer. We therefore begin by asking a more narrowly focused question: are conditions on planets…
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…
Microlensing is sensitive to binary, brown dwarf, and planetary companions to normal stars in the Galactic bulge with separations between about 1-10 AU. The accurate, densely-sampled photometry of microlensing events needed to detect…
Follow the big stars! I review the theory of detection and parameter measurement of planetary systems by follow-up observations of ongoing microlensing events. Two parameters can generically be measured from the event itself: the…
We evaluate gravitational lensing as a technique for the detection of extrasolar moons. Since 2004 gravitational microlensing has been successfully applied as a detection method for extrasolar planets. In principle, the method is sensitive…
We classify various types of planetary lensing signals and the channels of detecting them. We estimate the relative frequencies of planet detections through the individual channels with special emphasis on the new channels to be…
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…
The fields of occultation and microlensing are linked historically. Early this century, occultation of the Sun by the Moon allowed the apparent positions of background stars projected near the limb of the Sun to be measured and compared…
We investigate directly imaging exoplanets around eclipsing binaries, using the eclipse as a natural tool for dimming the binary and thus increasing the planet to star brightness contrast. At eclipse, the binary becomes point-like, making…
Microlensing has recently proven to be a valuable tool to search for extrasolar planets of Neptune- to super-Earth-mass planets at orbits of few AU. Since planetary signals are of very short duration, an intense and continuous monitoring is…
With its planet detection efficiency reaching a maximum for orbital radii between 1 and 10 AU, microlensing provides a unique sensitivity to planetary systems similar to our own around galactic and even extragalactic stars acting as lenses…
We present the analysis of microlensing event MOA-2010-BLG-117, and show that the light curve can only be explained by the gravitational lensing of a binary source star system by a star with a Jupiter mass ratio planet. It was necessary to…
Astrometry as a technique has so far proved of limited utility when employed as either a follow-up tool or to independently search for planetary mass companions orbiting nearby stars. However, this is bound to change during the next decade.…
Gravitational microlensing is a unique method for discovering cold planets across a broad mass range. Reliable statistics of the microlensing planets require accurate sensitivity estimates. However, the impact of the degeneracies in…