Related papers: Detecting Extra-Solar Planets via Microlensing at …

Recent studies have demonstrated that detailed monitoring of gravitational microlensing events can reveal the presence of planets orbiting the microlensed source stars. With the potential of probing planets in the Galactic Bulge and…

We present an analysis of high-resolution imaging of an exoplanet by a meter-class telescope positioned at a real image of the exoplanet created by the solar gravity lens. We assume an exoplanet viewed in full phase and a simple…

Microlensing can be used to discover exoplanets of a wide range of masses with orbits beyond ~ 1 AU, and even free-floating planets. The WFIRST mission will use microlensing to discover approximately 1600 planets by monitoring ~100 million…

The primary difficulty with using transits to discover extrasolar planets is the low probability a planet has of transiting its parent star. One way of overcoming this difficulty is to search for transits in dense stellar fields, such as…

The known extrasolar planets exhibit many interesting and surprising features--extremely short-period orbits, high-eccentricity orbits, mean-motion and secular resonances, etc.--and have dramatically expanded our appreciation of the…

If the dark halo of our galaxy is made of compact objects as massive as M = 10^6 solar masses, their detection by means of ordinary microlensing searches would take a very long time as the characteristic time scale of such a lensing event,…

The frequency of microlensing planet detections, particularly in difficult-to-model high-magnification events, is increasing. Their analysis can require tens of thousands of processor hours or more, primarily because of the high density and…

Searching for exoplanets with different methods has always been the focus of astronomers over the past few years. Among multiple planet detection techniques, astrometry stands out for its capability to accurately determine the orbital…

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…

Exoplanets, or planets outside our own solar system, have long been of interest to astronomers; however, only in the past two decades have scientists had the technology to characterize and study planets so far away from us. With advanced…

The detection of massive planets orbiting nearby stars has become almost routine, but current techniques are as yet unable to detect terrestrial planets with masses comparable to the Earth's. Future space-based observatories to detect…

In the coming decades, research in extrasolar planets aims to advance two goals: 1) detecting and characterizing low-mass planets increasingly similar to the Earth, and 2) improving our understanding of planet formation. We present a new…

The detection of lower mass planets now being reported via radial velocity and microlensing surveys suggests that they may be ubiquitous. If missions such as Kepler are able to confirm this, the detection and study of rocky planets via…

Directly imaging extrasolar planets using a monolithic optical telescope avoids many pitfalls of space interferometry and opens up the prospect of visible light studies of extrasolar planetary systems. Future astronomical missions may…

When extrasolar planets are observed to transit their parent stars, we are granted unprecedented access to their physical properties. It is only for transiting planets that we are permitted direct estimates of the planetary masses and…

Thirteen exo-planets have been discovered using the gravitational microlensing technique (out of which 7 have been published). These planets already demonstrate that super-Earths (with mass up to ~10 Earth masses) beyond the snow line are…

Exoplanets classified as super-Earths are commonly observed on short period orbits, close to their host stars, but their abundance on wider orbits is poorly constrained. Gravitational microlensing is sensitive to exoplanets on wide orbits.…

(Abridged) The solar system gas giant planets are oblate due to their rapid rotation. A measurement of the planet's projected oblateness would constrain the planet's rotational period. Planets that are synchronously rotating with their…

I present a review of observational efforts to study known extrasolar planets by methods that are complementary to the radial velocity technique. I describe the current state of attempts to detect and characterize such planets by…

Some low-mass planets are expected to be ejected from their parent planetary systems during early stages of planetary system formation. According to planet-formation theories, such as the core accretion theory, typical masses of ejected…