Related papers: Improving the Prospects for Detecting Extrasolar P…
It is plausible that most of the Stars in the Milky Way (MW) Galaxy, like the Sun, consist of planetary systems, instead of a single planet. Out of the estimately discovered 3,950 planet-hosting stars, about 860 of them are known to be…
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…
Microlensing surveys, which have discovered about a dozen extrasolar planets to date, have focused on the small minority of high-magnification lensing events, which have a high sensitivity to planet detection. In contrast, second-generation…
Following the suggestion of Gould and Depoy (1998) we investigate the feasibility of studying the brightest microlensing events towards the Galactic bulge using a small aperture (~10 cm) telescope. We used one of the HAT telescopes to…
An LSST-like survey of the Galactic plane (deep images every 3-4 days) could probe the Galactic distribution of planets by two distinct methods: gravitational microlensing of planets beyond the snow line and transits by planets very close…
Microlensing events are now regularly being detected by monitoring the flux of a large number of potential sources and measuring the combined magnification of the images. This phenomenon could also be detected directly from the…
Gravitational microlensing is a new technique that allows low-mass exoplanets to be detected at large distances of ~7kpc. This paper briefly outlines the principles of the method and describes the observational techniques. It shows that…
We review recent gravitational microlensing results from the EROS, MACHO, and OGLE collaborations, and present some details of the very latest MACHO results toward the Galactic Bulge. The MACHO collaboration has now discovered in excess of…
We explore the usefulness of future gravitational microlensing surveys in the study of binary properties such as the binary fraction and the distributions of binary separation and mass ratio by using the binary sample detectable through a…
We investigate the chance of detecting proto-planetary or debris disks in stars that induce microlensing events (lenses). The modification of the light curves shapes due to occultation and extinction by the disks as well as the additional…
It is estimated that a star brighter than visual magnitude 17 is undergoing a detectable gravitational microlensing event, somewhere on the sky, at any given time. It is assumed that both lenses and sources are normal stars drawn from a…
We present an analysis of the longest timescale microlensing events discovered by the MACHO Collaboration during a 7 year survey of the Galactic bulge. We find 6 events that exhibit very strong microlensing parallax signals due, in part, to…
Gravitational microlensing finds planets through their gravitational influence on the light coming from a more distant background star. The presence of the planet is then inferred from the tell-tale brightness variations of the background…
One important strength of the microlensing method in detecting extrasolar planets is its high sensitivity to low-mass planets. However, it is often believed that microlensing detections of Earth-mass planets from ground-based observation…
We show that Earth mass planets orbiting stars in the Galactic disk and bulge can be detected by monitoring microlensed stars in the Galactic bulge. The star and its planet act as a binary lens which generates a lightcurve which can differ…
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 evaluate gravitational lensing as a technique for the detection of extrasolar moons. Since 2004 gravitational microlensing has been successfully applied as a detection method for extrasolar planets. In principle, the method is sensitive…
Massive gravitational microlensing programs were begun about a decade ago as a means to search for compact baryonic dark matter in the Galaxy, but before the first events were detected the technique was also proposed as a means of detecting…
We use six years (2003 to 2008) of Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment III microlensing observations to derive the survey detection efficiency for a range of planetary masses and projected distances from the host star. We perform an…
From the 389 2002 OGLE-III observations of Galactic Bulge microlensing events we select 321 that are well described by a point-source point-lens lightcurve model. From this sample we identify n=1 event, 2002-BLG-055, which we regard as a…