Related papers: Locating Planets in Sky Using Manual Calculations
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…
Armed with an astrolabe and Kepler's laws one can arrive at accurate estimates of the orbits of planets.
Searching for exoplanets with different methods has always been the focus of astronomers over the past few years. Among multiple planet detection techniques, astrometry stands out for its capability to accurately determine the orbital…
The detection of exoplanets through direct imaging has produced numerous new positive identifications in recent years. The technique is biased towards planets at wide separations due to the difficulty in removing the stellar signature at…
The field of extrasolar planets is still, in comparison with other astrophysical topics, in its infancy. There have been about 300 or so extrasolar planets detected and their detection has been accomplished by various different techniques.…
Despite the revolution in our knowledge resulting from the detection of planets around mature stars, we know almost nothing about planets orbiting young stars because rapid rotation and active photospheres preclude detection by radial…
This paper is devoted to exploring how we can discover and study nearby (< 1-2 kpc) planetary and binary systems by observing their action as gravitational lenses. Lensing can extend the realm of nearby binaries and planets that can be…
Meteor showers on the Earth occur at well known times, and are associated with the decay of comets or other minor bodies whose orbital paths pass close to the Earth's trajectory. On the surface, determining the closest proximity of two…
Microlensing is the most promising method to study the statistical frequency of extra-solar planets orbiting typical (random) stars in the Milky Way, even those several kiloparsecs from Earth. The lensing zone corresponds to orbital…
I present a review of astrometric techniques and instrumentation utilized to search for, detect, and characterize extra-solar planets. First, I briefly summarize the properties of the present-day sample of extrasolar planets, in connection…
The most successful method used so far to search for extrasolar planets is the radial velocity technique, where periodical shifts on the measured emission from a star provide evidence for an orbiting planet. This method has been used on…
Mountain ranges, volcanoes, trenches, and craters are common on rocky bodies throughout the Solar System, and we might we expect the same for rocky exoplanets. With ever larger telescopes under design and a growing need to not just detect…
In the companion paper we began the task of systematically studying the detection of planets in wide orbits ($a > 1.5 R_E$) via microlensing surveys. In this paper we continue, focusing on repeating events. We find that, if all planetary…
The Einstein rings and proper motions of nearby stars tend to be large. Thus, every year some foreground stars within a few hundred parsecs of Earth induce gravitational lensing events in background stars. In some of these cases, the events…
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…
Accurate distances to stars and galaxies allow for significant tests of stellar evolution, galaxy formation and evolution and cosmology. NASA's Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) will obtain precision [1-30 microarcsec] astrometry for…
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…
Orbital detectors without pointing capability have to keep their field of view axis laying on their orbital plane, to observe the largest sky fraction. A general approach to estimate the exposure of each sky element for such detectors is a…
We introduce a new method of searching for and characterizing extra-solar planets. We show that by monitoring the center-of-light motion of microlensing alerts using the next generation of high precision astrometric instruments the…
It is shown here how prior estimates on the local shape of the universe can be used to reduce, to a small region, the full parameter space for the search of circles in the sky. This is the first step towards the development of efficient…