Related papers: Detecting Extrasolar Asteroid Belts Through Their …
We consider small-scale spheroidal clusters of weakly interacting massive particles in our Galaxy as non-compact gravitational microlenses and predict the appearance of caustics in the plane of a lensed source. The crossing of these…
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…
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…
Gaudi, Naber & Sackett pointed out that if an event is caused by a lens system containing more than two planets, all planets will affect the central region of the magnification pattern, and thus the existence of the multiple planets can be…
Microlensing offers a unique opportunity to probe exoplanets that are temperate and beyond the snow line, as small as Jovian satellites, at extragalactic distance, and even free floating exoplanets, regimes where the sensitivity of other…
Motivated by debris disk studies, we investigate the gravitational microlensing of background starlight by a planetesimal disk around a foreground star. We use dynamical survival models to construct a plausible example of a planetesimal…
The current searches for microlensing events towards the galactic bulge can be used to detect planets around the lensing stars. Their effect is a short-term modulation on the smooth lightcurve produced by the main lensing star. Current and…
We show that Earth mass planets orbiting stars in the Galactic disk and bulge can be detected by monitoring microlensed stars in the Galactic bulge. The star and its planet act as a binary lens which generates a lightcurve which can differ…
We evaluate gravitational lensing as a technique for the detection of extrasolar moons. Since 2004 gravitational microlensing has been successfully applied as a detection method for extrasolar planets. In principle, the method is sensitive…
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…
The only way to detect planets around stars at distances of several kpc is by (photometric or astrometric) microlensing observations. In this paper, we show that the capability of photometric microlensing extends to the detection of signals…
The gravitational pull of a large number of asteroids perturbs a pulsar's motion to a degree that is detectable through precision timing of millisecond pulsars. The result is a low-frequency, correlated noise process, similar in form to the…
Asteroids can be considered as sources of contamination of point sources and also sources of confusion noise, depending whether their presence is detected in the image or their flux is under the detection limit. We estimate that at low…
We demonstrate that microlensing can be used for detecting planets in binary stellar systems. This is possible because in the geometry of planetary binary systems where the planet orbits one of the binary component and the other binary star…
We study the possibility to detect extrasolar planets in M31 through pixel-lensing observations. Using a Monte Carlo approach, we select the physical parameters of the binary lens system, a star hosting a planet, and we calculate the…
Microlensing has proven to be a valuable tool to search for extrasolar planets of Jovian- to Super-Earth-mass planets at orbits of a few AU. Since planetary signals are of very short duration, an intense and continuous monitoring is…
The next generation of high-contrast imaging instruments will provide the first unresolved image of an extrasolar planet. While the emitted infrared light from the planet in thermal equilibrium should show almost no phase effect, the…
We present the first comprehensive study of astrometric microlensing by exotic astrophysical dark objects, focusing on two theoretically motivated models -- Q-ball and boson star. We demonstrate that these extended objects generate…
Earth-like extra-solar planets may be detected with 1-2m class telescopes using the gravitational microlensing technique. The essential requirement is the ability to be able to carry out continuous observations of the galactic bulge. A…
We performed numerical simulations of stellar occultations by extra-solar cometary tails. We find that extra-solar comets can be detected by the apparent photometric variations of the central stars. In most cases, the light curve shows a…