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Related papers: Reconstructing the Free-floating Planet Mass Funct…

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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…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2014-10-16 L. Hamolli , M. Hafizi , A. A. Nucita

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), NASA's next flagship observatory, has significant mission time to be spent on surveys for general astrophysics in addition to its three core community surveys. We considered what types of…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-04-23 Robyn E. Sanderson , Ryan Hickox , Christopher M. Hirata , Matthew J. Holman , Jessica R. Lu , Ashley Villar

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

Studies of resolved stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies reveal an amazingly detailed and clear picture of galaxy evolution. Within the Local Group, the ability to probe the stellar populations of small and large…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2022-09-28 Lachlan Lancaster , Sarah Pearson , Benjamin F. Williams , Kathryn V. Johnston , Tjitske K. Starkenburg , Erin Kado-Fong , Anil C. Seth , Eric F. Bell

Small planets ($\lesssim 1$ M$_\oplus$) at intermediate orbital distances ($\sim$1 au) represent an uncharted territory in exoplanetary science. The upcoming microlensing survey by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be sensitive to…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2024-12-06 Yayaati Chachan , Eve J. Lee

The number of exoplanets detected using gravitational microlensing technique is currently larger than 200, which enables population studies. Microlensing is uniquely sensitive to low-mass planets orbiting at separations of several…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2024-06-05 P. Mroz , R. Poleski

The mass and distance functions of free-floating planets (FFPs) would give major insights into the formation and evolution of planetary systems, including any systematic differences between those in the disk and bulge. We show that the only…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2021-08-18 Andrew Gould , Weicheng Zang , Shude Mao , Subo Dong

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…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-03 Dimitri Veras , Sean N. Raymond

With planets orbiting stars, a planetary mass function should not be seen as a low-mass extension of the stellar mass function, but a proper formalism needs to take care of the fact that the statistical properties of planet populations are…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-20 M. Dominik

Stellar streams form through the tidal disruption of satellite galaxies or globular clusters orbiting a host galaxy. Globular cluster streams are exciting since they are thin (dynamically cold) and, therefore sensitive to perturbations from…

Microlensing surveys suggest the presence of a surprisingly large population of free-floating planets, with a rate of about two Neptunes per star. The origin of such objects is not known, neither do we know if they are truly unbound or are…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2025-07-15 Sam Hadden , Yanqin Wu

The Milky way Galaxy is brimming with free-floating objects, including stars, planets and planetesimals. For the purpose of this chapter, we define a free-floating object as a solid body that is not orbited by a considerably more massive…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2024-10-01 Simon F. Portegies Zwart

A wide-field near-infrared survey of the Galactic disk and bulge/bar(s) is supported by a large representation of the community of Galactic astronomers. The combination of sensitivity, angular resolution and large field of view make Roman…

Galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lenses can constrain dark matter models and the Lambda Cold Dark Matter cosmological paradigm at sub-galactic scales. Currently, there is a dearth of images of these rare systems with high signal-to-noise…

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA's next flagship observatory, will redefine deep-field galaxy survey with a field of view two orders of magnitude larger than Hubble and an angular resolution of matching quality. These future…

We present realistic forecasts for the constraining power of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on fundamental cosmological parameters, with particular emphasis on the absolute neutrino mass scale, using full-shape analyzes of the galaxy…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2026-04-17 Francesco Spezzati , Yun Wang , Andrew Hearin

Recent ground-based microlensing surveys suggest that our Galaxy may abound with small free floating planets, potentially up to $\sim$21 such planets per star. We explore the implication of such possibility on the mass budget for planet…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2026-05-27 Eve J. Lee , William DeRocco , Sam Hadden , B. Scott Gaudi

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will revolutionize our understanding of the Galactic Bulge with its Galactic Bulge Time Domain survey. At the same time, Rubin Observatories's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will monitor billions of…

Multiple studies have shown that planet-planet scattering plays an important role in the dynamical evolution of planetary systems. For instance, it has been shown that planet-planet scattering can reproduce the eccentricity distribution of…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2025-01-24 Hareesh Gautham Bhaskar , Hagai Perets