Related papers: Microlensing due to free-floating moon-planet syst…
Astrometric observations of microlensing events can be used to obtain important information about lenses. During these events, the shift of the position of the multiple image centroid with respect to the source star location can be…
Microlensing is generally thought to probe planetary systems only out to a few Einstein radii. Microlensing events generated by bound planets beyond about 10 Einstein radii generally do not yield any trace of their hosts, and so would be…
One possibility for detecting low-amplitude pulsational variations is through gravitational microlensing. During a microlensing event, the temporary brightness increase leads to improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio, and thereby better…
Various methods have been proposed to search for extrasolar planets. Compared to the other methods, microlensing has unique applicabilities to the detections of Earth-mass and free-floating planets. However, the microlensing method is…
We propose and evaluate the feasibility of a new strategy to search for planets via microlensing. This new strategy is designed to detect planets in "wide" orbits, i.e., with orbital separation, $a$ greater than $\sim 1.5 R_E$. Planets in…
The study of extra-solar planetary systems has emerged as a new discipline of observational astronomy in the past few years with the discovery of a number of extra-solar planets. The properties of most of these extra-solar planets were not…
Results from gravitational microlensing suggested the existence of a large population of free-floating planetary mass objects. The main conclusion from this work was partly based on constraints from a direct imaging survey. This survey…
During microlensing events with a small impact parameter, the amplification of the source flux is sensitive to the surface brightness distribution of the source star. Such events provide a means for studying the surface structure of target…
We report analysis of high microlensing event MOA-2008-BLG-379, which has a strong microlensing anomaly at its peak, due to a massive planet with a mass ratio of q = 6.9 x 10^{-3}. Because the faint source star crosses the large resonant…
Microlensing events provide a unique way to detect and measure the masses of isolated, non-luminous objects, particularly dark stellar remnants. Under certain conditions, it is possible to measure the mass of these objects using photometry…
Current microlensing follow-up observations focus on high-magnification events because of the high efficiency of planet detection. However, central perturbations of high-magnification events caused by a planet can also be produced by a very…
Microlensing near macro-caustics is a complex phenomenon in which swarms of micro-images produced by micro-caustics form on both sides of a macro-critical curve. Recent discoveries of highly magnified images of individual stars in massive…
Planetary companions to the source stars of a caustic-crossing binary microlensing events can be detected via the deviation from the parent light curves created when the caustic magnifies the star light reflecting off the atmosphere or…
Gravitational microlensing is the only method capable of exploring the entire population of free-floating planets down to Mars-mass objects, because the microlensing signal does not depend on the brightness of the lensing object. A…
Recent observations of lensed galaxies at cosmological distances have detected individual stars that are extremely magnified when crossing the caustics of lensing clusters. In idealized cluster lenses with smooth mass distributions, two…
Short duration lensing events tend to be generated by low-mass lenses or by lenses with high transverse velocities. Furthermore, for any given lens mass and speed, events of short duration are preferentially caused by nearby lenses…
The gravity due to a multiple-mass system has a remarkable gravitational effect: the extreme magnification of background light sources along extended so-called caustic lines. This property has been the channel for some remarkable…
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…
Microlensing is increasingly gaining recognition as a powerful method for the detection and characterization of extra-solar planetary systems. Naively, one might expect that the probability of detecting the influence of more than one planet…
The gravitational microlensing light curves that reveal the presence of extrasolar planets generally yield the planet-star mass ratio and separation in units of the Einstein ring radius. The microlensing method does not require the…