Related papers: Nomads of the Galaxy
If the dark halo of our galaxy is made of compact objects as massive as M = 10^6 solar masses, their detection by means of ordinary microlensing searches would take a very long time as the characteristic time scale of such a lensing event,…
We present a conceptual design for a space based Galactic Exoplanet Survey Telescope (GEST) which will use the gravitational microlensing technique to detect extra solar planets with masses as low as that of Mars at all separations >~ 1 AU.…
Planetary Nebulae are the ionised ejected envelopes surrounding the remnant cores of dying stars. Theory predicts that main-sequence stars with one to about eight times the mass of our sun may eventually form planetary nebulae. Until now no…
We use star counts from 13 deep HST fields imaged with the {\it Wide Field Camera - 2} in order to constrain the amount of dark matter in the Galaxy that can be in the form of low-mass main sequence stars or white-dwarfs. Based on the…
A growing number of low luminosity and low surface brightness astronomical objects challenge traditional notions of both galaxies and star clusters. To address this, we propose a definition of galaxy independent of the cold dark matter…
Analyzing exoplanets detected by radial velocity or transit observations, we determine the multiplicity of exoplanet host stars in order to study the influence of a stellar companion on the properties of planet candidates. Matching the host…
We derive stellar masses from SED fitting to rest-frame optical and UV fluxes for 401 star-forming galaxies at z 4, 5, and 6 from Hubble-WFC3/IR observations of the ERS combined with the deep GOODS-S Spitzer/IRAC data (and include a…
Brown dwarfs are intermediate objects between planets and stars. The lower end of the brown-dwarf mass range overlaps with the one of massive planets and therefore the distinction between planets and brown-dwarf companions may require to…
The recent detection of microlensing of stars of LMC by compact objects in the halo of our galaxy suggests that our galaxy is surrounded by a non-luminous halo made of compact objects with mass of about $(0.03-0.5) \msun$. The rate of…
We calculate the expected lensing statistics of the galaxy population in large, low-redshift surveys. Galaxies are modeled using realistic, multiple components: a dark matter halo, a bulge component and disc. We use semi-analytic models of…
We report the discovery of a planetary system in which a super-earth orbits a late M-dwarf host. The planetary system was found from the analysis of the microlensing event OGLE-2017-BLG-0482, wherein the planet signal appears as a…
We analyse 11 years of precise radial velocities for 76 solar type stars from the Lick survey. Eight stars in this sample have previously reported planetary-mass companions, all with mass (m sin i) less than 8 Jupiter masses (MJ). For the…
Microlensing is the method of exoplanet detection that discovers solar system analog exoplanets. These are planets low in mass located in wide orbits around their host stars. Even though thousands of exoplanets are discovered, they are…
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.…
Free-floating (or rogue) planets are planets that are liberated (or ejected) from their host systems. Although simulations predict their existence in substantial numbers, direct observational evidence for free-floating planets with masses…
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…
Using current technology, gravitational microlensing is the only method that can measure planet masses over the full parameter space of planet and stellar-host masses and at a broad range of planet-host separations. I present a…
Aims. Neutron stars (NSs) produced in the Milky Way are supposedly ten to the eighth - ten to the ninth, of which only $\sim 2 \times 10^{3}$ are observed. Constraining the phase space distribution of NSs may help to characterize the yet…
A nearby star having a near-transit of a galaxy will cause a time-dependent weak lensing of the galaxy. Because the effect is small, we refer to this as weak microlensing. This could provide a useful method to weigh low-mass stars and brown…
[abridged] WFIRST is uniquely capable of finding planets with masses as small as Mars at separations comparable to Jupiter, i.e., beyond the current ice lines of their stars. These planets fall between the close-in planets found by Kepler…