Related papers: Discovery and Study of Nearby Habitable Planets wi…
This paper is devoted to exploring how we can discover and study nearby (< 1-2 kpc) planetary and binary systems by observing their action as gravitational lenses. Lensing can extend the realm of nearby binaries and planets that can be…
Searches for planets via gravitational lensing have focused on cases in which the projected separation, a, between planet and star is comparable to the Einstein radius, R_E. This paper considers smaller orbital separations and demonstrates…
Nearby masses can have a high probability of lensing stars in a distant background field. High-probability lensing, or mesolensing, can therefore be used to dramatically increase our knowledge of dark and dim objects in the solar…
The Einstein rings and proper motions of nearby stars tend to be large. Thus, every year some foreground stars within a few hundred parsecs of Earth induce gravitational lensing events in background stars. In some of these cases, the events…
Gravitational lensing provides a means to measure mass that does not rely on detecting and analysing light from the lens itself. Compact objects are ideal gravitational lenses, because they have relatively large masses and are dim. In this…
Gravitational microlensing finds planets through their gravitational influence on the light coming from a more distant background star. The presence of the planet is then inferred from the tell-tale brightness variations of the background…
Gravitational lensing is a powerful astrophysical and cosmological probe and is particularly valuable at submillimeter wavelengths for the study of the statistical and individual properties of dusty starforming galaxies. However the…
(abridged) The study of other worlds is key to understanding our own, and not only provides clues to the origin of our civilization, but also looks into its future. Rather than in identifying nearby systems and learning about their…
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…
The successful prediction of lensing events is a new and exciting enterprise that provides opportunities to discover and study planetary systems. The companion paper investigates the underlying theory. This paper is devoted to outlining the…
Four planets have recently been discovered by gravitational microlensing. The most recent of these discoveries is the lowest-mass planet known to exist around a normal star. The detection of planets in gravitational microlensing events was…
Terrestrial planets are more likely to be detected if they orbit M dwarfs due to the favorable planet/star size and mass ratios. However, M dwarf habitable zones are significantly closer to the star than the one around our Sun, which leads…
With several detections, the technique of gravitational microlensing has proven useful for studying planets that orbit stars at Galactic distances, and it can even be applied to detect planets in neighbouring galaxies. So far, planet…
We show that a space-based gravitational microlensing survey for terrestrial extra-solar planets is feasible in the near future, and could provide a nearly complete picture of the properties of planetary systems in our Galaxy. We present…
Microlensing is one of the most powerful methods that can detect extrasolar planets and a future space-based survey with a high monitoring frequency is proposed to detect a large sample of Earth-mass planets. In this paper, we examine the…
We show that Earth mass planets orbiting stars in the Galactic disk and bulge can be detected by monitoring microlensed stars in the Galactic bulge. The star and its planet act as a binary lens which generates a lightcurve which can differ…
We demonstrate that microlensing can be used for detecting planets in binary stellar systems. This is possible because in the geometry of planetary binary systems where the planet orbits one of the binary component and the other binary star…
More than 100 microlensing events have been detected during the last ~4 years, most of them towards the Galactic Bulge. Since the line of sight towards the Bulge passes through the disk and the Bulge itself, the known stars towards the…
The current searches for microlensing events towards the galactic bulge can be used to detect planets around the lensing stars. Their effect is a short-term modulation on the smooth lightcurve produced by the main lensing star. Current and…
Since the first microlensing planet discovery in 2003, more than 200 planets have been detected with gravitational microlensing, in addition to several free-floating planet and black hole candidates. In this chapter the microlensing theory…