Related papers: Exoplanet Occurrence Rates from Microlensing Surve…
Recent detections of extremely short-timescale microlensing events imply the existence of a large population of Earth- to Neptune-mass planets that appear to have no host stars. However, it is currently unknown whether these objects are…
We are still in the early days of exoplanet discovery. Astronomers are beginning to model the atmospheres and interiors of exoplanets and have developed a deeper understanding of processes of planet formation and evolution. However, we have…
Gravitational microlensing events of high magnification provide exceptional sensitivity to the presence of low-mass planets orbiting the lens star, including planets with masses as low as that of Earth. The essential requirement for the…
The Kepler Mission is exploring the diversity of planets and planetary systems. Its legacy will be a catalog of discoveries sufficient for computing planet occurrence rates as a function of size, orbital period, star-type, and insolation…
The discovery of extra-solar planets is arguably the most exciting development in astrophysics during the past 15 years, rivalled only by the detection of dark energy. Two projects unite the communities of exoplanet scientists and…
The gravitational microlensing technique is most sensitive to planets in a Jupiter-like orbit and has detected more than 200 planets. However, only a few wide-orbit ($s > 2$) microlensing planets have been discovered, where $s$ is the…
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…
In the currently-favored paradigm of planet formation, the location of the snow line in the protoplanetary disk plays a crucial role. Determining the demographics of planets beyond the snow line of stars of various masses is thus essential…
Are there other planetary systems in our Universe? Indirect evidence has been found for planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy: the gravity of orbiting planets makes the star wobble, and the resulting periodic Doppler shifts have been…
Thousands of extrasolar planets have been discovered, and it is clear that the galactic planetary census draws on a diversity greatly exceeding that exhibited by the solar system's planets. We review significant landmarks in the chronology…
Recent gravitational microlensing observations predict a vast population of free-floating giant planets that outnumbers main sequence stars almost twofold. A frequently-invoked mechanism for generating this population is a dynamical…
The Kepler Mission has discovered thousands of exoplanets and revolutionized our understanding of their population. This large, homogeneous catalog of discoveries has enabled rigorous studies of the occurrence rate of exoplanets and…
Although many methods of detecting extra-solar planets have been proposed and successful implementation of some of these methods enabled a rapidly increasing number of exoplanet detections, little has been discussed about the method of…
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…
One core goal of the Kepler mission was to determine the frequency of Earth-like planets that orbit Sun-like stars. Accurately estimating this planet occurrence rate requires both a well-vetted list of planets and a clear understanding of…
We introduce a new method of searching for and characterizing extra-solar planets. We show that by monitoring the center-of-light motion of microlensing alerts using the next generation of high precision astrometric instruments the…
The detection of exoplanets through direct imaging has produced numerous new positive identifications in recent years. The technique is biased towards planets at wide separations due to the difficulty in removing the stellar signature at…
Searches for planets via gravitational lensing have focused on cases in which the projected separation, a, between planet and star is comparable to the Einstein radius, R_E. This paper considers smaller orbital separations and demonstrates…
With manual searching processes, the rate at which scientists and astronomers discover exoplanets is slow because of inefficiencies that require an extensive time of laborious inspections. In fact, as of now there have been about only 5,000…
Free-floating planets are recently drawing a special interest of the scientific community. Gravitational microlensing is up to now the exclusive method for the investigation of free-floating planets, including their spatial distribution…