Related papers: "Auxiliary" Science with the WFIRST Microlensing S…
The gravitational microlensing as a unique astrophysical tool can be used for studying the atmosphere of stars thousands of parsec far from us. This capability results from the bending of light rays in the gravitational field of a lens…
Microlensing is one of the most powerful tools for probing the nature of dark halo objects and the sources they lens. As our nearest massive galaxy, M31 provides a rich source population with many potential lenses in its halo crossing our…
We present the analysis of the first two years of the OGLE search for gravitational lenses towards the Galactic bulge. We detected 9 microlensing events in an algorithmic search of $ \sim 10^8 $ measurements of $ \sim 10^6 $ stars. The…
A large wide-field telescope and camera with optical throughput over 200 m^2 deg^2 -- a factor of 50 beyond what we currently have -- would enable the detection of faint moving or bursting optical objects: from Earth threatening asteroids…
We give an overview and describe the rationale, methods, and first results from NIRCam images of the JWST "Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science" ("PEARLS") project. PEARLS uses up to eight NIRCam filters to survey…
We present the first measurement of the mass function of free-floating planets (FFP) or very wide orbit planets down to an Earth mass, from the MOA-II microlensing survey in 2006-2014. Six events are likely to be due to planets with…
The presence of brown dwarfs in the dark galactic halo could be detected through their gravitational lensing effect and experiments under way monitor about one million stars to observe a few lensing events per year. We show that if the…
The Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1) survey of M31 (PAndromeda) is designed to identify gravitational microlensing events, caused by bulge and disk stars (self-lensing) and by compact matter in the halos of M31 and the Milky Way (halo lensing, or lensing…
The James Webb Space Telescope is orders of magnitude more sensitive than any other facility across the near to mid-infrared wavelengths. Many approved programs take advantage of its highly stable point spread function (PSF) to directly…
We argue that gravitational microlensing is a feasible technique for measuring the mass function of brown dwarf stars in distant galaxies. Microlensing surveys of the bulge of M31, and of M87 in the Virgo cluster, may provide enough events…
We present the BoRG-JWST survey, a combination of two JWST Cycle 1 programs aimed at obtaining NIRSpec spectroscopy of representative, UV-bright $7<z<10$ galaxy candidates across 22 independent sight lines selected from Hubble/WFC3…
The \emph{Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer} has surveyed the entire sky at four infrared wavelengths with greatly improved sensitivity and spatial resolution compared to its predecessors, the \emph{Infrared Astronomical Satellite} and…
The Frontier Fields are a director's discretionary time campaign with HST and the Spitzer Space Telescope to see deeper into the universe than ever before. The Frontier Fields combine the power of HST and Spitzer with the natural…
By combining SIM observations with ground-based photometry, one can completely solve microlensing events seen toward the Galactic bulge. One could measure the mass, distance, and transverse velocity of ~100 lenses to ~5% precision in only…
Galactic Exoplanet Survey Telescope (GEST) was proposed for a discovery mission to search for microlensing terrestrial planets toward the Galactic bulge and also Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) that are believed to hold vital information of the…
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…
Primordial black holes (PBHs), hypothesized to be the result of density fluctuations during the early universe, are candidates for dark matter. When microlensing background stars, they cause a transient apparent enhancement of the flux.…
[NIRSS is one of three concepts that contributed to the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) mission advocated by the Decadal Survey.] Operating beyond the reaches of the Earth's atmosphere, free of its limiting absorption and…
We present near-infrared emission line counts and luminosity functions from the HST WFC3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallels (WISP) program for 29 fields (0.037 deg^2) observed using both the G102 and G141 grisms. Altogether we identify 1048…
The Grism Lens-Amplified Survey from Space (GLASS) is a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Large Program, which will obtain 140 orbits of grism spectroscopy of the core and infall regions of 10 galaxy clusters, selected to be among the very best…