Related papers: The WFIRST Exoplanet Microlensing Survey
The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will answer fundamental questions about the evolution of dark energy over time and expand the catalog of known exoplanets into new regions of parameter space. Using a Hubble-sized mirror and…
Cosmic acceleration is the most surprising cosmological discovery in many decades. Testing and distinguishing among possible explanations requires cosmological measurements of extremely high precision probing the full history of cosmic…
The WFIRST microlensing mission will measure precise light curves and relative parallaxes for millions of stars, giving it the potential to characterize short-period transiting planets all along the line of sight and into the galactic…
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…
In December 2010, NASA created a Science Definition Team (SDT) for WFIRST, the Wide Field Infra-Red Survey Telescope, recommended by the Astro 2010 Decadal Survey as the highest priority for a large space mission. The SDT was chartered to…
NASA's WFIRST mission will perform a wide-field, NIR survey of the Galactic Bulge to search for exoplanets via the microlensing techniques. As the mission is due to launch in the mid-2020s, around half-way through the LSST Main Survey, we…
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…
Augmenting the \emph{WFIRST} microlensing campaigns with intensive observations from a ground-based network of wide-field survey telescopes would have several major advantages. First, it would enable full two-dimensional (2-D) vector…
A space-based gravitational microlensing exoplanet survey will provide a statistical census of exoplanets with masses greater than 0.1 Earth-masses and orbital separations ranging from 0.5AU to infinity. This includes analogs to all the…
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…
Astrophysical transients have been observed for millennia and have shaped our most basic assumptions about the Universe. In the last century, systematic searches have grown from detecting handfuls of transients per year to over 7000 in 2018…
We present a community-led assessment of the solar system investigations achievable with NASA's next-generation space telescope, the Wide Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST). WFIRST will provide imaging, spectroscopic, and…
We simulate the scientific performance of the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) High Latitude Survey (HLS) on dark energy and modified gravity. The 1.6 year HLS Reference survey is currently envisioned to image 2000 deg$^2$ in…
WFIRST is the highest priority space mission of the Decadal review, however, it is unlikely to begin in this decade primarily due to a anticipated NASA budget that is unlikely to have sufficient resources to fund such a mission. For this…
Thirteen exo-planets have been discovered using the gravitational microlensing technique (out of which 7 have been published). These planets already demonstrate that super-Earths (with mass up to ~10 Earth masses) beyond the snow line are…
The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is expected to launch in the mid-2020s. With its wide-field near-infrared (NIR) camera, it will survey the sky to unprecedented detail. As part of normal operations and as the result of…
I present a method using only a few ground-based observations of magnified microlensing events to routinely measure the parallaxes of WFIRST events if WFIRST is in an L2 orbit. This could be achieved for all events with Amax > 30 using…
Two decades after its discovery, cosmic acceleration remains the most profound mystery in cosmology and arguably in all of physics. Either the Universe is dominated by a form of dark energy with exotic physical properties not predicted by…
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…
Exoplanet research has shown an incessant growth since the first claim of a hot giant planet around a solar-like star in the mid-1990s. Today, the new facilities are working to spot the first habitable rocky planets around low-mass stars as…