Related papers: Augmenting WFIRST Microlensing with a Ground-based…
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…
A space-based gravitational microlensing exoplanet survey will provide a statistical census of exoplanets with masses down to 0.1 Earth-masses and orbital separations ranging from 0.5AU to infinity. This includes analogs to all the Solar…
Ground-based telescopes coupled with adaptive optics (AO) have been playing a leading role in exoplanet direct imaging science and technological development for the past two decades and will continue to have an indispensable role for the…
This article looks at the combined constraints from a photometric and spectroscopic survey. These surveys will measure cosmology using weak lensing (WL), galaxy clustering, baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) and redshift space distortions…
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…
We classify various types of planetary lensing signals and the channels of detecting them. We estimate the relative frequencies of planet detections through the individual channels with special emphasis on the new channels to be…
Currently, over forty transiting planets have been discovered by ground-based photometric surveys, and space-based missions like Kepler and CoRoT are expected to detect hundreds more. Follow-up photometric observations from the ground will…
We consider the feasibility of directly observing gravitational microlensing in extra-galactic sources, whose stars are not generally resolved. This precludes use of the simple optical depth to microlensing formulation, which is applicable…
Extrasolar planet searches targeting very low-mass stars and brown dwarfs are hampered by intrinsic or instrumental limitations. Time series of astrometric measurements with precisions better than one milli-arcsecond can yield new evidence…
A major problem in the interpretation of microlensing events is that the only measured quantity, the Einstein time scale t_E, is a degenerate combination of the three quantities one would like to know, the mass, distance, and speed of the…
We present the first example of binary microlensing for which the parameter measurements can be verified (or contradicted) by future Doppler observations. This test is made possible by a confluence of two relatively unusual circumstances.…
The Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) will drift away from the Earth at about 0.1 AU/yr. Microlensing events will therefore have different characteristics as seen from the satellite and the Earth. From the difference, it is possible…
Motivated by the ongoing Spitzer observational campaign, and the forecoming K2 one, we revisit, working in an heliocentric reference frame, the geometrical foundation for the analysis of the microlensing parallax, as measured with the…
Microlens parallax measurements combining space-based and ground-based observatories can be used to study planetary demographics. In recent years, the Spitzer Space Telescope was used as a microlens parallax satellite. Meanwhile,…
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…
The Astro2010 Decadal Survey recommended a Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) as its top priority for a new large space mission. The report of the WFIRST-AFTA Science Definition Team (SDT) presents a Design Reference Mission for…
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…
We discuss scientific, technical and programmatic issues related to the use of an NRO 2.4m telescope for the WFIRST initiative of the 2010 Decadal Survey. We show that this implementation of WFIRST, which we call "NEW WFIRST," would achieve…
The identification and study of the first galaxies remains one of the most exciting topics in observational cosmology. The determination of the best possible observing strategies is a very important choice in order to build up a…
While microlensing is very rare, occurring on average once per million stars observed, current and near-future surveys are coming online with the capability of providing photometry of almost the entire visible sky to depths up to R ~ 22 mag…