Related papers: Microlensing Searches for Exoplanets
During the months when the galactic bulge is visible from the southern hemisphere, there are typically about 8 to 10 on-going microlensing events at any given time. If the lensing stars have planets around them, then the signature of the…
We propose gravitational microlensing as a way of testing the emergent gravity theory recently proposed by Eric Verlinde~\cite{Verlinde:2016toy}. We consider two limiting cases: the dark mass of maximally anisotropic pressures (Case I) and…
A close-in giant planetary (CGP) system has a net polarization signal whose value varies depending on the orbital phase of the planet. This polarization signal is either caused by the stellar occultation or by reflected starlight from the…
Astronomy is at times a science of unexpected discovery. When it is, and if we are lucky, new intellectual territories emerge to challenge our views of the cosmos. The recent indirect detections using high-precision Doppler spectroscopy of…
Kepler's quest for other Earths need not end just yet: it remains capable of characterizing cool Earth-mass planets by microlensing, even given its degraded pointing control. If Kepler were pointed at the Galactic bulge, it could conduct a…
Since the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015, gravitational-wave astronomy has emerged as a rapidly advancing field that holds great potential for studying the cosmos, from probing the properties of black holes to testing the…
The new astronomical technique of gravitational microlensing enables measurements of high precision to be made in certain circumstances. Useful advances have been made in the fields of galactic astronomy, stellar astronomy and planetary…
Gravitational lensing has developed into one of the most powerful tools for the analysis of the dark universe. This review summarises the theory of gravitational lensing, its main current applications and representative results achieved so…
Astrometric observations of microlensing events were originally proposed to determine the lens proper motion with which the physical parameters of lenses can be better constrained. In this proceeding, we demonstrate that besides this…
Strong gravitational lensing of quasars has the potential to unlock the poorly understood physics of these fascinating objects, as well as serve as a probe of the lensing mass distribution and of cosmological parameters. In particular,…
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.,…
The occultation of background stars by foreground Solar system objects, such as planets and asteroids, has been widely used as an observational probe to study physical properties associated with the foreground sample. Similarly, the…
The MPF mission 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 Solar System's planets except for Mercury, as…
Strong gravitational lenses provide unique laboratories for cosmological and astrophysical investigations, but they must first be discovered - a task that can be met with significant contamination by other astrophysical objects and…
The basic concepts of gravitational microlensing are introduced. We start with the lens equation, and then derive the image positions and magnifications. The statistical quantities of optical depth and event rate are then described. We…
Large scale imaging surveys will increase the number of galaxy-scale strong lensing candidates by maybe three orders of magnitudes beyond the number known today. Finding these rare objects will require picking them out of at least tens of…
An extra-solar planet can be detected by microlensing because the planet can perturb the smooth lensing light curve created by the primary lens. However, it was shown by Gaudi that a subset of binary-source events can produce light curves…
We investigate the feasibility of extracting the gravitational nanolensing signal due to the presence of subsolar mass halos within galaxy-sized dark matter halos. We show that subsolar mass halos in a lensing galaxy can cause strong…
Gravitational microlensing is a very useful tool for investigating the innermost part of lensed quasars, especially for studying a relativistic accretion disk around a massive black hole (BH) supposed to exist in a quasar's center. Here we…
We study the wave optics features of gravitational microlensing by a binary lens composed of a planet and a parent star. In this system, the source star near the caustic line produces a pair of images in which they can play the role of…