Related papers: Extending the Planetary Mass Function to Earth Mas…
We significantly constrain the sky position, distance, and mass of a possible additional, distant planet in the solar system by examining its influence on the distance between Earth and the Cassini Spacecraft. Our preferred region is…
We report the gravitational microlensing discovery of a sub-Saturn mass planet, MOA-2009-BLG-319Lb, orbiting a K or M-dwarf star in the inner Galactic disk or Galactic bulge. The high cadence observations of the MOA-II survey discovered…
I present a novel method for measuring lens masses for microlensing events. By combining a measured lens flux with the microlens parallax vector pi_E, it is possible to derive the mass of the lens system without knowing the angular size of…
The abundance of protoplanetary bodies ejected from their parent star system is presently poorly-constrained. With only two existing optical observations of interstellar objects in the $10^{8} - 10^{10}$ kg mass range and a small number of…
Free-floating planets are the remnants of violent dynamical rearrangements of planetary systems. It is possible that even our own solar system ejected a large planet early in its evolution. WFIRST will have the ability to detect…
High-magnification gravitational microlensing events provide an important channel of detecting planetary systems with multiple giants located at their birth places. In order to investigate the potential existence of additional planets, we…
This paper constructs a theoretical framework for calculating the distribution of masses for gas giant planets forming via the core accretion paradigm. Starting with known properties of circumstellar disks, we present models for the…
We report the discovery of a microlensing planet OGLE-2012-BLG-0950Lb with the planet/host mass ratio of $q \sim 2 \times 10^{-4}$. A long term distortion detected in both MOA and OGLE light curve can be explained by the microlens parallax…
The growing rate of increase in the number of the discovered extra-solar planets which has consequently raised the enthusiasm to explore the universe in hope of finding earth-like planets has resulted in the wide use of Gravitational…
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…
We use X-ray observations of quasar microlensing (sensitive to smaller compact objects than in the optical) to study the possible presence of a population of low mass black holes (from $\sim$ $10^{-3}M_{\odot}$ to $10^{-1}M_{\odot}$) in…
Microlensing events are now regularly being detected by monitoring the flux of a large number of potential sources and measuring the combined magnification of the images. This phenomenon could also be detected directly from 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…
We combine Spitzer and ground-based observations to measure the microlens parallax vector ${\mathbf \pi}_{\rm E}$, and so the mass and distance of OGLE-2014-BLG-0124L, making it the first microlensing planetary system with a space-based…
We study the possibility to detect extrasolar planets in M31 through pixel-lensing observations. Using a Monte Carlo approach, we select the physical parameters of the binary lens system, a star hosting a planet, and we calculate the…
We use six years (2003 to 2008) of Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment III microlensing observations to derive the survey detection efficiency for a range of planetary masses and projected distances from the host star. We perform an…
The standard light curve of a microlensing event provides only two constraints on the six unknown parameters of the lens. We show that narrow-band photometry during a microlensing event of a giant star can in addition determine the angular…
Free-floating planets are recently drawing a special interest of the scientific community. Gravitational microlensing is up to now the exclusive method for the investigation of free-floating planets, including their spatial distribution…
Most known extrasolar planets (exoplanets) have been discovered using the radial velocity$^{\bf 1,2}$ or transit$^{\bf 3}$ methods. Both are biased towards planets that are relatively close to their parent stars, and studies find that…
Gravitational microlensing at cosmological distances is potentially a powerful tool for probing the mass functions of stars and compact objects in other galaxies. In the case of multiply-imaged quasars, microlensing data has been used to…