Related papers: Microlensing by Kuiper, Oort, and Free-Floating Pl…
Roman microlensing stands at a crossroads between its originally charted path of cataloging a population of cool planets that has subsequently become well-measured down to super-Earths, and the path of free-floating planets (FFPs), which…
Among more than 200 extrasolar planet candidates discovered to date, there is no known planet orbiting around normal binary stars. In this paper, we demonstrate that microlensing is a technique that can detect such planets. Microlensing…
Gravitational microlensing is currently the only technique that helps study the Galactic distribution of planets as a function of distance from the Galactic center. The Galactic location of a lens system can be uniquely determined only when…
Free-floating planets are the remnants of violent dynamical rearrangements of planetary systems. It is possible that even our own solar system ejected a large planet early in its evolution. WFIRST will have the ability to detect…
Gravitational microlensing is a powerful method for detecting and characterizing free-floating planetary-mass objects (FFPs). FFPs could have exomoons rotating them. In this work, we study the probability of realizing these systems (i.e.,…
We explore the detection condition of a wide-separation planet through the perturbation induced by the planetary caustic for various microlensing parameters, especially for the size of the source stars. By constructing the fractional…
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…
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…
I review results from, and future prospects for, microlensing searches for extrasolar planets. Analyses of well-sampled microlensing light curves by several collaborations have demonstrated that current searches are sensitive to…
The nature and origin of free-floating planets (FFPs) are still largely unconstrained because of a lack of large homogeneous samples to enable a statistical analysis of their properties. So far, most FFPs have been discovered using indirect…
We present the first measurement of the mass function of free-floating planets (FFP) or very wide orbit planets down to an Earth mass, from the MOA-II microlensing survey in 2006-2014. Six events are likely to be due to planets with…
Results from gravitational microlensing suggested the existence of a large population of free-floating planetary mass objects. The main conclusion from this work was partly based on constraints from a direct imaging survey. This survey…
Current microlensing surveys are sensitive to free-floating planets down to Earth-mass objects. All published microlensing events attributed to unbound planets were identified based on their short timescale (below two days), but lacked an…
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…
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 has a unique advantage for detecting dark objects in the Milky Way, such as free-floating planets, neutron stars, and stellar-mass black holes. Most microlensing surveys focus on the Galactic bulge, where higher stellar density…
Microlensing is a powerful technique to study the Galactic population of "dark" objects such as exoplanets both bound and unbound, brown dwarfs, low-luminosity stars, old white dwarfs, neutron stars, and almost the only way to study…
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…
I show that the WFIRST microlensing survey will enable detection and precision orbit determination of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) down to H_=28.2 over an effective area of about 17 sq.deg. Typical fractional period errors will be about 1.5%…
Previously, planets have been detected only in the Milky Way galaxy. Here, we show that quasar microlensing provides a means to probe extragalactic planets in the lens galaxy, by studying the microlensing properties of emission close to the…