Related papers: Microlensing Observations Rapid Search for Exoplan…
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…
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…
There is a remarkable synergy between requirements for Dark Energy probes by cosmic shear measurements and planet hunting by microlensing. Employing weak and strong gravitational lensing to trace and detect the distribution of matter on…
The longest microlensing events provide enough information to estimate the mass and distance of the lens. Among hundreds of millions of stars which were monitored for many years by the OGLE project we selected those with clear parallax…
The phenomenon of microlensing has successfully been used to detect extrasolar planets. By observing characteristic, rare deviations in the gravitational microlensing light curve one can discover that a lens is a star--planet system. In…
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…
Microlensing is able to reveal multiple body systems located several kilo-parsec away from the Earth. Since it does not require the measurement of light from the lens, microlensing is sensitive to a range of objects from free-floating…
The gravitational microlensing as a unique astrophysical tool can be used for studying the atmosphere of stars thousands of parsec far from us. This capability results from the bending of light rays in the gravitational field of a lens…
Much interest has been generated recently by the ongoing MACHO, EROS and OGLE projects to identify gravitationally lensed stars from the Large Magellanic Cloud and Galactic bulge, and the positive identification of several events (Alcock et…
Gravitational microlensing is a new technique for studying the surfaces of distant stars. A point mass lens, usually a low-mass star from the disk, will typically resolve the surface of a red giant in the Galactic bulge, as well as amplify…
AGAPE is an observational search of massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) in the direction of M31 by means of a novel method: the gravitational microlensing of unresolved stars. The search consists in examining CCD pixel light curves for…
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…
Planet formation theories predict the existence of free-floating planets that have been ejected from their parent systems. Although they emit little or no light, they can be detected during gravitational microlensing events. Microlensing…
To assess how future progress in gravitational microlensing computation at high optical depth will rely on both hardware and software solutions, we compare a direct inverse ray-shooting code implemented on a graphics processing unit (GPU)…
Traditional approaches to measuring the stellar mass function (MF) are fundamentally limited because objects are detected based on their luminosity, not their mass. These methods are thereby restricted to luminous and relatively nearby…
(abridged) The study of other worlds is key to understanding our own, and not only provides clues to the origin of our civilization, but also looks into its future. Rather than in identifying nearby systems and learning about their…
The spatial distribution of compact dark matter in our Galaxy can be determined in a few years of monitoring Galactic globular clusters for microlensing. Globular clusters are the only dense fields of stars distributed throughout the…
Gravitational microlensing is the only method capable of exploring the entire population of free-floating planets down to Mars-mass objects, because the microlensing signal does not depend on the brightness of the lensing object. A…
The Microlensing Planet Finder (MPF) is a proposed Discovery mission that will complete the first census of extrasolar planets with sensitivity to planets like those in our own solar system. MPF will employ a 1.1m aperture telescope, which…
The status of searches for gravitational microlensing events of the stars in our galaxy and in other galaxies of the Local Group, the interpretation of the results, some theory, and prospects for the future are reviewed. The searches have…