Related papers: LSST's DC Bias Against Planets and Galactic-Plane …
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) surveys have initially been optimized to omit the inner part of the Milky Way disk/bar from deep and cadence observations. However it is now clear that the LSST will be powerful for Galactic…
Under the current microlensing planet search strategy of monitoring events caused by stellar-mass lenses, only planets located within a narrow region of separations from central stars can be effectively detected. However, with the dramatic…
Gravitational microlensing provides a unique window on the properties and prevalence of extrasolar planetary systems because of its ability to find low-mass planets at separations of a few AU. The early evidence from microlensing indicates…
Gravitational microlensing events of high magnification provide exceptional sensitivity to the presence of low-mass planets orbiting the lens star, including planets with masses as low as that of Earth. The essential requirement for the…
Gravitational microlensing events of high magnification have been shown to be promising targets for detecting extrasolar planets. However, only a few events of high magnification have been found using conventional survey techniques. Here we…
Planetary systems toward the Galactic Bulge can be detected through microlensing measurements. The microlensing planet search technique has some unique merits: low-mass planets can be detected from the ground; the Galactic family of…
With round-the-clock monitoring of galactic bulge microlensing events, the PLANET experiment constrains the abundance and can yield the discovery of planets down to the mass of earth around galactic disk and bulge stars. Data taken until…
Extrasolar planets found by gravitational microlensing often require assumptions on the source star distance and relative proper motion. Only in a few cases has it been possible to confirm these findings with space-based observations or…
Due to their extremely small luminosity compared to the stars they orbit, planets outside our own Solar System are extraordinarily difficult to detect directly in optical light. Careful photometric monitoring of distant stars, however, can…
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…
Characterizing a planet detected by microlensing is hard if the planetary signal is weak or the lens-source relative trajectory is far from caustics. However, statistical analyses of planet demography must include those planets to…
To move one step forward toward a Galactic distribution of planets, we present the first planet sensitivity analysis for microlensing events with simultaneous observations from space and the ground. We present this analysis for two such…
Four planets have recently been discovered by gravitational microlensing. The most recent of these discoveries is the lowest-mass planet known to exist around a normal star. The detection of planets in gravitational microlensing events was…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is conceived as an 8.4-m telescope with CCD or CMOS focal plane covering most of a field 0.6 m in diameter, the latter exceeding the size of the largest photographic plates ever used in astronomy.…
Recent studies have demonstrated that detailed monitoring of gravitational microlensing events can reveal the presence of planets orbiting the microlensed source stars. With the potential of probing planets in the Galactic Bulge and…
This is a preliminary report on the application of Difference Image Analysis (DIA) to galactic bulge images. The aim of this analysis is to increase the sensitivity to the detection of gravitational microlensing. We discuss how the DIA…
NASA's WFIRST mission will perform a wide-field, NIR survey of the Galactic Bulge to search for exoplanets via the microlensing techniques. As the mission is due to launch in the mid-2020s, around half-way through the LSST Main Survey, we…
Upcoming deep optical surveys, such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), will scan the sky to unprecedented depths, detecting billions of galaxies. However, this amount of detections will lead to the…
Gravitational microlensing finds planets through their gravitational influence on the light coming from a more distant background star. The presence of the planet is then inferred from the tell-tale brightness variations of the background…
Microlensing has recently proven to be a valuable tool to search for extrasolar planets of Neptune- to super-Earth-mass planets at orbits of few AU. Since planetary signals are of very short duration, an intense and continuous monitoring is…