Related papers: Probing Structures of Distant Extrasolar Planets w…
Under the current microlensing planet search strategy of monitoring events caused by stellar-mass lenses, only planets located within a narrow region of separations from central stars can be effectively detected. However, with the dramatic…
We explore the detection condition of a wide-separation planet through the perturbation induced by the planetary caustic for various microlensing parameters, especially for the size of the source stars. By constructing the fractional…
We revisit the possibility of detecting an extrasolar planet around a background star as it crosses the fold caustic of a foreground binary lens. During such an event, the planet's flux can be magnified by a factor of ~100 or more. The…
We propose a direct method to detect close-in giant planets orbiting stars in the Galactic bulge. This method uses caustic-crossing binary microlensing events discovered by survey teams monitoring the bulge to measure light from a planet…
The current searches for microlensing events towards the galactic bulge can be used to detect planets around the lensing stars. Their effect is a short-term modulation on the smooth lightcurve produced by the main lensing star. Current and…
Recent discoveries of circumbinary planets in Kepler data show that there is a viable channel of planet formation around binary main sequence stars. Motivated by these discoveries, we have investigated the caustic structures and…
The gravitational microlensing light curves that reveal the presence of extrasolar planets generally yield the planet-star mass ratio and separation in units of the Einstein ring radius. The microlensing method does not require the…
We consider microlensing of an elliptical source crossing a fold caustic. We derive a simple expression for the light curve of a source with uniform surface brightness that is accurate to third order in the ellipticity e (yielding errors of…
We study the possibility to detect extrasolar planets in M31 through pixel-lensing observations. Using a Monte Carlo approach, we select the physical parameters of the binary lens system, a star hosting a planet, and we calculate the…
We investigate whether rings around extrasolar planets could be detected from those planets' transit lightcurves. To this end we develop a basic theoretical framework for calculating and interpreting the lightcurves of ringed planet…
With their excellent photometric precision and dramatic increase in monitoring frequency, future microlensing survey experiments are expected to be sensitive to very short time-scale, isolated events caused by free-floating and…
Among various techniques to search for extra-solar planets, microlensing has some unique characteristics. Contrary to all other methods which favour nearby objects, microlensing is sensitive to planets around stars at distances of several…
A microlensing lensing zone refers to the range of planet-star separations where the probability of detecting a planetary signal is high. Its conventional definition as the range between $\sim 0.6$ and 1.6 Einstein radii of the primary lens…
We propose that extrasolar asteroid belts can be detected through their gravitational microlensing signatures. Asteroid belt + star lens systems create so-called "pseudo-caustics", regions in the source plane where the magnification…
We demonstrate that microlensing can be used for detecting planets in binary stellar systems. This is possible because in the geometry of planetary binary systems where the planet orbits one of the binary component and the other binary star…
The Einstein rings and proper motions of nearby stars tend to be large. Thus, every year some foreground stars within a few hundred parsecs of Earth induce gravitational lensing events in background stars. In some of these cases, the events…
With several detections, the technique of gravitational microlensing has proven useful for studying planets that orbit stars at Galactic distances, and it can even be applied to detect planets in neighbouring galaxies. So far, planet…
The phenomenon of microlensing has successfully been used to detect extrasolar planets. By observing characteristic, rare deviations in the gravitational microlensing light curve one can discover that a lens is a star--planet system. In…
Recent observations of lensed galaxies at cosmological distances have detected individual stars that are extremely magnified when crossing the caustics of lensing clusters. In idealized cluster lenses with smooth mass distributions, two…
Highly magnified stars residing in caustic crossing lensed galaxies at z ~ 0.7-1.5 in galaxy cluster lensing fields inevitably exhibit recurrent brightening events as they traverse a micro caustic network cast down by foreground…