Related papers: Unbound or Distant Planetary Mass Population Detec…
Studies of the planet abundance as a function of stellar mass have suggested a strong increase in the frequency of planet occurrence around stars more massive than $1.5 M_\odot$, and that such stars are deficit in short period planets.…
We report the discovery of planetary companions orbiting four low-luminosity giant stars with M$_\star$ between 1.04 and 1.39 M$_\odot$. All four host stars have been independently observed by the EXoPlanets aRound Evolved StarS (EXPRESS)…
Free-floating objects (FFOs) in interstellar space$-$rogue planets, brown dwarfs, and large asteroids that are not gravitationally bound to any star$-$are expected to be ubiquitous throughout the Milky Way. Recent microlensing surveys have…
Microlensing can access planet populations that no other method can probe: cold wide-orbit planets beyond the snow line, planets in both the Galactic bulge and disk, and free floating planets (FFPs). The demographics of each population will…
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…
We present the discovery of a Neptune-mass planet OGLE-2007-BLG-368Lb with a planet-star mass ratio of q=[9.5 +/- 2.1] x 10^{-5} via gravitational microlensing. The planetary deviation was detected in real-time thanks to the high cadence of…
Context: More than 50 exoplanets have been found around giant stars, revealing different properties when compared to planets orbiting solar-type stars. In particular, they are Super-Jupiters and are not found orbiting interior to $\sim$ 0.5…
The discovery of now about 20 extrasolar planets orbiting solar-type stars with properties quite different from those in our Solar System has raised many questions about the formation and evolution of planets. The tidal interaction between…
Microlensing is potentially sensitive to multiple-planet systems containing analogs of all the solar system planets except Mercury, as well as to free floating planets. I review the landscape of microlensing planet searches, beginning with…
It is now reasonably clear that disc fragmentation can only operate in the outer parts of protostellar discs ($r > 50$ au). It is also expected that any object that forms via disc fragmentation will have an initial mass greater than that of…
Recent gravitational microlensing observations predict a vast population of free-floating giant planets that outnumbers main sequence stars almost twofold. A frequently-invoked mechanism for generating this population is a dynamical…
The recent discoveries of giant planets around nearby stars have galvanized the planetary science community, astronomers, and the public at large. Since {\it direct} detection is now feasible, and is suggested by the recent acquisition of…
We investigate the evolution of protoplanets with different masses embedded in an accretion disk, via global fully three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations. We consider a range of planetary masses extending from one and a half Earth's…
We follow the microlensing approach and quantify the occurrence of Kepler exoplanets as a function of planet-to-star mass ratio, q, rather than planet radius or mass. For planets with radii ~1-6 R_earth and periods <100 days, we find that,…
We propose and evaluate the feasibility of a new strategy to search for planets via microlensing observations. This new strategy is designed to detect planets in "wide" orbits, i.e., with orbital separation, a, greater than ~1.5 R_E.…
The orbital parameters of the observed extrasolar planets differ strongly from those of our own solar system. The differences include planets with high masses, small semi-major axis and large eccentricities. We performed numerical…
One core goal of the Kepler mission was to determine the frequency of Earth-like planets that orbit Sun-like stars. Accurately estimating this planet occurrence rate requires both a well-vetted list of planets and a clear understanding of…
We investigate the migration of massive extrasolar planets due to gravitational interaction with a viscous protoplanetary disc. We show that a model in which planets form at 5 AU at a constant rate, before migrating, leads to a predicted…
For centuries, humanity wondered if there were other worlds like ours in the Universe. For about a quarter of a century, we have known that planetary systems exist around other stars, and more than 3800 exoplanetary systems have been…
Massive gravitational microlensing programs were begun about a decade ago as a means to search for compact baryonic dark matter in the Galaxy, but before the first events were detected the technique was also proposed as a means of detecting…