Related papers: The WFIRST Exoplanet Microlensing Survey
The focus of this report is on the opportunities enabled by the combination of LSST, Euclid and WFIRST, the optical surveys that will be an essential part of the next decade's astronomy. The sum of these surveys has the potential to be…
In this paper, we describe the wide-field spectroscopic survey telescope (WST) project. WST is a 12-metre wide-field spectroscopic survey telescope with simultaneous operation of a large field-of-view (3 sq. degree), high-multiplex (20,000)…
WFIRST-CGI is a NASA technology demonstration mission that is charged with demonstrating key technologies for future exo-Earth imaging missions in space. In the process, it will obtain images and low-resolution spectra of a handful to a…
The Planet Formation Imager (PFI) is a near- and mid-infrared interferometer project with the driving science goal of imaging directly the key stages of planet formation, including the young proto-planets themselves. Here, we will present…
The abundance of protoplanetary bodies ejected from their parent star system is presently poorly-constrained. With only two existing optical observations of interstellar objects in the $10^{8} - 10^{10}$ kg mass range and a small number of…
We use nearly 20 years of photometry obtained by the OGLE survey to measure the occurrence rate of wide-orbit (or ice giant) microlensing planets, i.e., with separations from ~5 AU to ~15 AU and mass-ratios from $10^{-4}$ to 0.033. In a…
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…
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…
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…
Understanding the atmospheres of exoplanets is a milestone to decipher their formation history and potential habitability. High-contrast imaging and spectroscopy of exoplanets is the major pathway towards the goal. Directly imaging of an…
The Kepler Mission was a NASA Discovery-class mission designed to continuously monitor the brightness of at least 100,000 stars to determine the frequency of Earth-size and larger planets orbiting other stars. Once the Kepler proposal was…
Microlensing has recently proven to be a valuable tool to search for extrasolar planets of Neptune- to super-Earth-mass planets at orbits of few AU. Since planetary signals are of very short duration, an intense and continuous monitoring is…
Since the first microlensing planet discovery in 2003, more than 200 planets have been detected with gravitational microlensing, in addition to several free-floating planet and black hole candidates. In this chapter the microlensing theory…
We present the description of the instruments and the first results of the PRime-focus Infrared Microlensing Experiment (PRIME). PRIME is the first dedicated near-infrared (NIR) microlensing survey telescope located at the South African…
There is a remarkable synergy between requirements for Dark Energy probes by cosmic shear measurements and planet hunting by microlensing. Employing weak and strong gravitational lensing to trace and detect the distribution of matter on…
Traditional approaches to measuring the stellar mass function (MF) are fundamentally limited because objects are detected based on their luminosity, not their mass. These methods are thereby restricted to luminous and relatively nearby…
The number of exoplanets detected using gravitational microlensing technique is currently larger than 200, which enables population studies. Microlensing is uniquely sensitive to low-mass planets orbiting at separations of several…
The outer regions of globular clusters can enable us to answer many fundamental questions concerning issues ranging from the formation and evolution of clusters and their multiple stellar populations to the study of stars near and beyond…
The Euclid, Rubin/LSST and Roman (WFIRST) projects will undertake flagship optical/near-infrared surveys in the next decade. By mapping thousands of square degrees of sky and covering the electromagnetic spectrum between 0.3 and 2 microns…
Among the methods proposed to detect extrasolar planets, microlensing is the only technique that can detect free-floating planets. Free-floating planets are detected through the channel of short-duration isolated lensing events. However, if…