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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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-04 Sascha P. Quanz , David Lafreniere , Michael R. Meyer , Maddalena M. Reggiani , Esther Buenzli

We investigate gravitational microlensing signals produced by a spatially extended object transiting in front of a finite-sized source star. The most interesting features arise for lens and source sizes comparable to the Einstein radius of…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-10-28 Djuna Croon , David McKeen , Nirmal Raj , Zihui Wang

The mass function (MF) of isolated objects measured by microlensing consists of both a stellar and a planetary component. We compare the microlensing MFs of Gould et al (2022) and Sumi et al (2023) to other measurements of the MF. The…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2025-03-17 Jennifer C. Yee , Scott J. Kenyon

Primordial black holes (PBHs) have long been suggested as a viable candidate for the elusive dark matter (DM). The abundance of such PBHs has been constrained using a number of astrophysical observations, except for a hitherto unexplored…

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…

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…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2017-08-23 Andrew Gould

A recent preprint by Sugiyama et al. reported the discovery of twelve candidates for short-timescale (less than one day) gravitational microlensing events based on high-cadence photometric observations of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) using…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2026-05-05 Przemek Mróz , Andrzej Udalski

Microlensing of stars places significant constraints on sub-planetary-mass compact objects, including primordial black holes, as dark matter candidates. As the lens' Einstein radius in the source plane becomes comparable to the size of the…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-05-15 Nolan Smyth , Stefano Profumo , Samuel English , Tesla Jeltema , Kevin McKinnon , Puragra Guhathakurta

A microlensing survey by Sumi et al. (2011) exhibits an overabundance of short-timescale events (STEs; t_E<2 days) relative to what is expected from known stellar populations and a smooth power-law extrapolation down to the brown dwarf…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2017-01-04 Christian Clanton , B. Scott Gaudi

We present updated microlensing analysis results based on high-cadence ($\sim$2~min) Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) observations of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) in 2014, 2017, and 2020, yielding a total of 39.3 hours of data. We use a…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2026-02-10 Sunao Sugiyama , Masahiro Takada , Naoki Yasuda , Nozomu Tominaga

Quasar microlensing serves as a unique probe of discrete objects within galaxies and galaxy clusters. Recent advancement of the technique shows that it can constrain planet-scale objects beyond our native galaxy by studying their induced…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-01-08 Saloni Bhatiani , Xinyu Dai , Eduardo Guerras

Simultaneous space- and ground-based microlensing surveys, such as K2's Campaign 9 (K2C9) and $WFIRST$, facilitate measuring the masses and distances of free-floating planet (FFP) candidates. FFPs are identified as single-lens events with a…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2016-10-05 Calen B. Henderson , Yossi Shvartzvald

With its planet detection efficiency reaching a maximum for orbital radii between 1 and 10 AU, microlensing provides a unique sensitivity to planetary systems similar to our own around galactic and even extragalactic stars acting as lenses…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 M. Dominik

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…

We search for signatures of planets in 43 intensively monitored microlensing events that were observed between 1995 and 1999. Planets would be expected to cause a short duration (~1 day) deviation on the smooth, symmetric light curve…

Gravitational microlensing constraints on non-standard compact objects are conventionally derived assuming lenses trace the dark matter halo with velocities following a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution centered around $10^{-3}c$. However, a…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2026-05-06 Manish Tamta , Nirmal Raj , Himanshu Verma

Though free-floating planets (FFPs) may outpopulate their bound counterparts in the terrestrial-mass range, they remain one of the least explored exoplanet demographics. Due to their negligible electromagnetic emission at all wavelengths,…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2025-10-14 Michelle Kunimoto , William DeRocco , Nolan Smyth , Steve Bryson , B. Scott Gaudi

A measurement by microlensing of the planetary mass function of planets with masses ranging from 5M_E to 10M_J and orbital radii from 0.5 to 10 AU was reported recently. A strategy for extending the mass range down to (1-3)M_E is proposed…

A space-based gravitational microlensing exoplanet survey 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…

Free-floating planets are the remnants of violent dynamical rearrangements of planetary systems. It is possible that even our own solar system ejected a large planet early in its evolution. WFIRST will have the ability to detect…

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