Related papers: Augmenting WFIRST Microlensing with a Ground-based…
[abridged] WFIRST is uniquely capable of finding planets with masses as small as Mars at separations comparable to Jupiter, i.e., beyond the current ice lines of their stars. These planets fall between the close-in planets found by Kepler…
We show that a space-based gravitational microlensing survey for terrestrial extra-solar planets is feasible in the near future, and could provide a nearly complete picture of the properties of planetary systems in our Galaxy. We present…
The Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey's highest recommended space mission was a Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) to efficiently conduct three kinds of studies: dark energy surveys, exoplanet surveys, and guest surveys.…
With their excellent photometric precision and dramatic increase in monitoring frequency, future microlensing survey experiments are expected to be sensitive to very short time-scale, isolated events caused by free-floating and…
We propose and evaluate the feasibility of a new strategy to search for planets via microlensing. This new strategy is designed to detect planets in "wide" orbits, i.e., with orbital separation, $a$ greater than $\sim 1.5 R_E$. Planets in…
The ESA cornerstone mission The Far-Infrared and Submillimetre Sapce Telescope (FIRST) has the ideal combination of sensitivity and angular resolving power to determine the bright counts of galaxies over a large area of sky in the…
Of all planet-finding techniques, microlensing is potentially the most sensitive to Earth-mass planets. However, microlensing lightcurves generically yield only the planet-star mass ratio: the mass itself is uncertain to a factor of a few.…
The event rate and the efficiency of mass estimation for free-floating planet (FFP) microlensing events were determined from the simulation of the simultaneous parallax observations by Euclid, WFIRST, and LSST. The stellar population from…
One of the major limitations of microlensing observations toward the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is the low rate of event detection. What can be done to improve this rate? Is it better to invest telescope time in more frequent observations…
Astrometric observations of microlensing events were originally proposed to determine the lens proper motion with which the physical parameters of lenses can be better constrained. In this proceeding, we demonstrate that besides this…
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…
In this work, we study the advantages of using a Lucky Imaging camera for the observations of potential planetary microlensing events. Our aim is to reduce the blending effect and enhance exoplanet signals in binary lensing systems composed…
In this paper, we explore the astrophysical implications of near-field microlensing and its effects on stellar transit observations, with a special emphasis on the Kepler mission. Kepler is a NASA-approved mission whose goal is to detect 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 Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will monitor $\sim 2$ deg$^2$ toward the Galactic bulge in a wide ($\sim 1-2~\mu$m) W149 filter at 15-minute cadence with exposure times of $\sim$50s for 6 seasons of 72 days each, for a…
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…
The parallax effect in ground-based microlensing (ML) observations consists of a distortion to the standard ML light curve arising from the Earth's orbital motion. In most cases, the resolution in current ML surveys is not accurate enough…
K2 Campaign 9 (K2C9) offers the first chance to measure parallaxes and masses of members of the large population of free-floating planets (FFPs) that has previously been inferred from measurements of the rate of short-timescale microlensing…
Pixel microlensing, i.e. gravitational microlensing of unresolved stars, can be used to explore distant stellar systems, and as a bonus may be able to detect extragalactic planets. In these studies, binary-lens events with multiple…
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.…