Related papers: Sensitivity to habitable planets in the \textit{Ro…
Microlensing is sensitive to binary, brown dwarf, and planetary companions to normal stars in the Galactic bulge with separations between about 1-10 AU. The accurate, densely-sampled photometry of microlensing events needed to detect…
This paper aims to quantify how the lowest halo mass that can be detected with galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lensing depends on the quality of the observations and the characteristics of the observed lens systems. Using simulated data,…
Giant planets within the habitable zones of the closest several stars can currently be imaged with ground-based telescopes. Within the next decade, the Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) will begin to image the habitable zones of a greater…
The search for habitable planets has revealed many planets that can vary greatly from an Earth analog environment. These include highly eccentric orbits, giant planets, different bulk densities, relatively active stars, and evolved stars.…
We report the discovery and analysis of a candidate triple-lens single-source (3L1S) microlensing event, OGLE-2019-BLG-1470. This event was first classified as a normal binary-lens single-source (2L1S) event, but a careful 2L1S modelling…
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) will perform a Galactic Exoplanet Survey (RGES) to discover bound exoplanets with semi-major axes greater than 1 au using gravitational microlensing. Roman will even be sensitive to planetary…
Next-generation missions designed to detect biosignatures on exoplanets will also be capable of placing constraints on technosignatures (evidence for technological life) on these same worlds. Here, I estimate the detectability of nightside…
Even though the recently discovered high-magnification event MOA-2010-BLG-311 had complete coverage over the peak, confident planet detection did not happen due to extremely weak central perturbations (fractional deviations of $\lesssim…
Recently Sahu et al., using the Hubble Space Telescope to monitor stars in the direction of the old globular cluster M22, detected six events in which otherwise constant stars brightened by ~50% during a time of <1 day. They tentatively…
We report the detection of the cool, Jovian-mass planet MOA-2007-BLG-400Lb. The planet was detected in a high-magnification microlensing event (with peak magnification A_max = 628) in which the primary lens transited the source, resulting…
We report the characterization of a massive (m_p=3.9 +- 1.4 M_jup) microlensing planet (OGLE-2015-BLG-0954Lb) orbiting an M dwarf host (M=0.33 +- 0.12 M_sun) at a distance toward the Galactic bulge of 0.6 (+0.4,-0.2) kpc, which is extremely…
We investigate the data collected by the high-cadence microlensing surveys during the 2022 season in search for planetary signals appearing in the light curves of microlensing events. From this search, we find that the lensing event…
A goal of the future Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is to directly image and spectroscopically characterize true Earth-analogs. However, if a large fraction of HWO target stars host unknown dynamically disruptive giant planets in their…
We report results from intensive monitoring of two fields on either side of M31,emphasizing microlensing involving stars and masses in M31. These results stem from the three-year VATT/Columbia survey of variability on 3d to 2m timescales.…
We report the detection of an extrasolar planet of mass ratio q ~ 2 x 10^(-4) in microlensing event MOA-2007-BLG-192. The best fit microlensing model shows both the microlensing parallax and finite source effects, and these can be combined…
The Microlensing Planet Finder (MPF) is a proposed Discovery mission that will complete the first census of extrasolar planets with sensitivity to planets like those in our own solar system. MPF will employ a 1.1m aperture telescope, which…
Since 1995, more than 500 exoplanets have been detected using different techniques, of which 11 were detected with gravitational microlensing. Most of these are gravitationally bound to their host stars. There is some evidence of…
The detection and characterization of habitable planets around nearby stars persist as one of the foremost objectives in contemporary astrophysics. This work investigates the synergistic integration of astrometric and direct imaging…
Extrasolar planets found by gravitational microlensing often require assumptions on the source star distance and relative proper motion. Only in a few cases has it been possible to confirm these findings with space-based observations or…
With the detection of extrasolar moons (exomoons) on the horizon, it is important to consider their potential for habitability. If we consider the circumstellar Habitable Zone (HZ, often described in terms of planet semi-major axis and…