Related papers: WFIRST Planet Masses from Microlens Parallax
We estimate the rate of near-field microlensing events expected from all-sky surveys and investigate the properties of these events. Under the assumption that all lenses are composed of stars, our estimation of the event rate ranges from…
Gravitational microlensing may detect dark stellar remnants - black holes or neutron stars - even if they are isolated. However, it is challenging to estimate masses of isolated dark stellar remnants using solely photometric data for…
In order to understand the nature of the lenses that generate microlensing events, one would like to measure their mass, distance, and velocity. Unfortunately, current microlensing experiments measure only one parameter of the events, the…
The probability of detecting a planetary companion of a lensing star during a microlensing event toward the Galactic center, averaged over all relevant event and galactic parameters, when the planet-star mass ratio $q=0.001$ has a maximum…
Astrometric observations of microlensing events can be used to obtain important information about lenses. During these events, the shift of the position of the multiple image centroid with respect to the source star location can be…
Microlensing is a powerful and unique technique to probe isolated objects in the Galaxy. To study the characteristics of these interesting objects based on the microlensing method, measurement of the microlens parallax is required to…
Terrestrial planets may be detected using the gravitational microlensing technique. This was demonstrated in the high magnification event MACHO-98-BLG-35. Observing strategies aimed at measuring the abundance of terrestrial planets are…
We measure the dependence of planet frequency on host star mass, $M_{\rm L}$, and distance from the Galactic center, $R_{\rm L}$, using a sample of planets discovered by gravitational microlensing. We compare the two-dimensional…
Astrometric measurements of microlensing events can in principle determine both the "parallax" \tilde r_E and the "proper motion" \mu of an individual event which (combined with the Einstein time scale t_E) in turn yield the mass, distance,…
We consider strong gravitational lensing by nearby stars. Using our wave-optical treatment of lensing phenomena, we study Einstein rings that may form around nearby stellar lenses. It is remarkable that these rings are bright and large…
We analyze OGLE-2007-BLG-050, a high magnification microlensing event (A ~ 432) whose peak occurred on 2 May, 2007, with pronounced finite-source and parallax effects. We compute planet detection efficiencies for this event in order to…
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…
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.…
Interferometric observations of microlensing events have the potential to provide unique constraints on the physical properties of the lensing systems. In this work, we first present a formalism that closely combines interferometric and…
We report on the analysis of a microlensing event OGLE-2014-BLG-1722 that showed two distinct short term anomalies. The best fit model to the observed light curves shows that the two anomalies are explained with two planetary mass ratio…
Following previous suggestions of other researchers, this paper discusses the prospects for astrometric observation of MACHO gravitational microlensing events. We derive the expected astrometric observables for a simple microlensing event…
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…
We present microlens parallax measurements for 21 (apparently) isolated lenses observed toward the Galactic bulge that were imaged simultaneously from Earth and Spitzer, which was ~1 AU West of Earth in projection. We combine these…
We show that a wide-field Kepler-like satellite in Solar orbit could obtain microlens parallaxes for several thousand events per year that are identified from the ground, yielding masses and distances for several dozen planetary events.…
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…