Related papers: Measuring the Galactic Distribution of Transiting …
Microlensing can be used to discover exoplanets of a wide range of masses with orbits beyond ~ 1 AU, and even free-floating planets. The WFIRST mission will use microlensing to discover approximately 1600 planets by monitoring ~100 million…
[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…
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…
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…
The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is expected to detect hundreds of free-floating planets, but it will not be able to measure their masses. However, simultaneous microlensing observations by both Euclid and WFIRST…
If planetary systems are ubiquitous then a fraction of stars should possess a transiting planet when being microlensed. This paper presents a study of the influence of such planets on microlensing light curves. For the giant planets…
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…
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…
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…
Among various techniques to search for extra-solar planets, microlensing has some unique characteristics. Contrary to all other methods which favour nearby objects, microlensing is sensitive to planets around stars at distances of several…
Microlensing is generally thought to probe planetary systems only out to a few Einstein radii. Microlensing events generated by bound planets beyond about 10 Einstein radii generally do not yield any trace of their hosts, and so would be…
WFIRST microlensing observations will return high-precision parallaxes, sigma(pi) < 0.3 microarcsec, for the roughly 1 million stars with H<14 in its 2.8 deg^2 field toward the Galactic bulge. Combined with its 40,000 epochs of high…
The Wide Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is the next NASA astrophysics flagship mission, to follow the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The WFIRST mission was chosen as the top-priority large space mission of the 2010 astronomy…
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…
With several detections, the technique of gravitational microlensing has proven useful for studying planets that orbit stars at Galactic distances, and it can even be applied to detect planets in neighbouring galaxies. So far, planet…
Though free-floating planets (FFPs) may outpopulate their bound counterparts in the terrestrial-mass range, they remain one of the least explored exoplanet demographics. Due to their negligible electromagnetic emission at all wavelengths,…
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…
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…
Simultaneous space- and ground-based microlensing surveys, such as K2's Campaign 9 (K2C9) and $WFIRST$, facilitate measuring the masses and distances of free-floating planet (FFP) candidates. FFPs are identified as single-lens events with a…
The gravitational microlensing light curves that reveal the presence of extrasolar planets generally yield the planet-star mass ratio and separation in units of the Einstein ring radius. The microlensing method does not require the…