Related papers: Kepler Microlens Planets and Parallaxes
Context: Gravitational microlensing is sensitive to compact-object lenses in the Milky Way, including white dwarfs, neutron stars or black holes, and could potentially probe a wide range of stellar remnant masses. However, the mass of the…
Considering a sample of 31 exoplanetary systems detected by gravitational microlensing, we investigate whether or not the estimated distances to these systems conform to the Galactic distribution of planets expected from models. We derive…
Augmenting the \emph{WFIRST} microlensing campaigns with intensive observations from a ground-based network of wide-field survey telescopes would have several major advantages. First, it would enable full two-dimensional (2-D) vector…
In this article, we have investigated the possibility to distinguish between different galactic models through the microlensing parallax studies. We show that a systematic search for parallax effects can be done using the currently running…
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…
An extrasolar planet can be detected via microlensing from the perturbation it makes in the smooth lensing light curve of the primary. In addition to the conventional photometric microlensing, astrometric observation of the center-of-light…
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…
Parallax is the most fundamental technique to measure distances to astronomical objects. Although terrestrial parallax was pioneered over 2000 years ago by Hipparchus (ca. 140 BCE) to measure the distance to the Moon, the baseline of the…
We describe a high-precision Doppler search for giant planets orbiting a well-defined sample of metal-poor dwarfs in the field. This experiment constitutes a fundamental test of theoretical predictions which will help discriminate between…
Most stellar remnants so far have been found in binary systems, where they interact with matter from their companions. Isolated neutron stars and black holes are difficult to find as they are dark, yet they are predicted to exist in our…
With planets orbiting stars, a planetary mass function should not be seen as a low-mass extension of the stellar mass function, but a proper formalism needs to take care of the fact that the statistical properties of planet populations are…
Since the first discovery of microlensing events nearly two decades ago, gravitational microlensing has accumulated tens of TBytes of data and developed into a powerful astrophysical technique with diverse applications. The review starts…
Gravitational microlensing has the potential to provide direct gravitational masses of single, free-floating brown dwarfs, independent of evolutionary and atmospheric models. The proper motions and parallaxes of nearby brown dwarfs can be…
Imaging of planets is very difficult, due to the glare from their nearby, much brighter suns. Static and slowly-evolving aberrations are the limiting factors, even after application of adaptive optics. The residual speckle pattern is highly…
Exoplanetary science has reached a historic moment. The James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of probing the atmospheres of rocky planets, and perhaps even search for biologically produced gases. However this is contingent on…
We analyze three years (1998-2000) of OGLE observations of microlensing events to place limits on the abundance of planets with a planet-to-star mass ratio $q=10^{-3}$ at distances $\sim 1-4$AU from their host stars, i.e. `cool Jupiters'.…
Modern surveys of gravitational microlensing events have progressed to detecting thousands per year. Surveys are capable of probing Galactic structure, stellar evolution, lens populations, black hole physics, and the nature of dark matter.…
The Kepler Mission is exploring the diversity of planets and planetary systems. Its legacy will be a catalog of discoveries sufficient for computing planet occurrence rates as a function of size, orbital period, star-type, and insolation…
We show that for high-magnification (Amax > 100) microlensing events, accurate microlens parallaxes can be obtained from three or fewer photometric measurements from a small telescope on a satellite in solar orbit at ~1 AU from Earth. This…
Microlensing is one of the most promising tools for discovering stellar-mass black holes (BHs) in the Milky Way because it allows us to probe dark or faint celestial compact objects. While the existence of stellar-mass BHs has been…