Related papers: Hexadecapole Approximation in Planetary Microlensi…
Gravitational microlensing is the only method capable of exploring the entire population of free-floating planets down to Mars-mass objects, because the microlensing signal does not depend on the brightness of the lensing object. A…
High-precision radial velocity planet searches have surveyed over ~2000 nearby stars and detected over ~200 planets. While these same stars likely harbor many additional planets, they will become increasingly challenging to detect, as they…
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…
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 propose to use a simple observable, the fractional area of "hot spots" in weak gravitational lensing mass maps which are detected with high significance, to determine background cosmological parameters. Because these high-convergence…
Microlensing is a powerful tool for discovering cold exoplanets, and the The Roman Space Telescope microlensing survey will discover over 1000 such planets. Rapid, automated classification of Roman's microlensing events can be used to…
Cluster-scale strong lensing is a powerful tool for exploring the properties of dark matter and constraining cosmological models. However, due to the complex parameter space, pixelized strong lens modeling in galaxy clusters is…
The microlensing technique has found 10 exoplanets to date and promises to discover more in the near future. While planetary transit light curves all show a familiar shape, planetary perturbations to microlensing light curves can manifest a…
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 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 Microlensing Planet Finder (MPF) is a proposed Discovery mission that will complete the first census of extrasolar planets with sensitivity to planets like those in our own solar system. MPF will employ a 1.1m aperture telescope, which…
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.…
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…
The statistical distribution of the masses of planets about stars between the Sun and the center of the galaxy is constrained to within a factor of three by an intensive search for planets during microlensing events. Projected separations…
Microlensing is the only method that can detect and measure mass of wide orbit, low mass, solar system analog exoplanets. Mass measurements of such planets would yield massive science on planet formation, exoplanet demographics, free…
Gravitational microlensing is one of the methods to detect exoplanets; planets outside our solar system. Here we focus on theoretical modeling of three lens systems and in particular circumbinary systems. Circumbinary systems include two…
A planetary microlensing event is characterized by a short-lived perturbation to the standard Paczy\'nski curve. Planetary perturbations typically last from a few hours to a day, and have maximum amplitudes, $\dmax$, of $5-20%$ of the…
Among more than 200 extrasolar planet candidates discovered to date, there is no known planet orbiting around normal binary stars. In this paper, we demonstrate that microlensing is a technique that can detect such planets. Microlensing…
The computation of the magnification of a finite source by an arbitrary gravitational lens can be reduced from a two-dimensional to a one-dimensional integral using a generalization of Stoke's theorem. For a large source lensed by a…
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…