Related papers: Secure Identification of Free-Floating Planets
We present the analysis of four candidate short duration binary microlensing events from the 2006-2007 MOA Project short event analysis. These events were discovered as a byproduct of an analysis designed to find short timescale single lens…
Short duration lensing events tend to be generated by low-mass lenses or by lenses with high transverse velocities. Furthermore, for any given lens mass and speed, events of short duration are preferentially caused by nearby lenses…
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 propose a method to detect exoplanets based on their host star's intensity centroid after it passes thru a vortex filter. Based on our calculations with planets in face-on orbits, exoplanets with relative proximity to their host stars…
Microlensing is increasingly gaining recognition as a powerful method for the detection and characterization of extra-solar planetary systems. Naively, one might expect that the probability of detecting the influence of more than one planet…
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…
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…
Microlensing light curves are now being monitored with the precision required to detect small perturbations due to planetary companions of the primary lens. Microlensing is complementary to other planetary search techniques in its potential…
Searching for extrasolar planets by direct detection is extremely challenging for current instrumentation. Indirect methods, that measure the effect of a planet on its host star, are much more promising and have indeed led to the discovery…
Free-floating planets are a new class of planets recently discovered. These planets don't orbit within stellar systems, instead living a nomadic life within the galaxy. How such objects formed remains elusive. Numerous works have explored…
To maximize the number of planet detections by increasing efficiency, current microlensing follow-up observation experiments are focusing on high-magnification events to search for planet-induced perturbations near the peak of lensing light…
Despite the suspected binarity for a significant fraction of Galactic lenses, the current photometric surveys detected binary microlensing events only for a small fraction of the total events. The detection efficiency is especially low for…
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…
Of all planet-finding techniques, microlensing is potentially the most sensitive to Earth-mass planets. However, microlensing lightcurves generically yield only the planet-star mass ratio: the mass itself is uncertain to a factor of a few.…
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…
The statistical distribution of the masses of planets about stars between the Sun and the center of the galaxy is constrained to within a factor of three by an intensive search for planets during microlensing events. Projected separations…
The MPF mission 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 Solar System's planets except for Mercury, as…
Microlensing is the only method that can detect and measure mass of wide orbit, low mass, solar system analog exoplanets. Mass measurements of such planets would yield massive science on planet formation, exoplanet demographics, free…
In addition to constructing a Galactic matter mass function free from the bias induced by the hydrogen-burning limit, gravitational microlensing allows one to construct a mass function which is less affected by the problem of unresolved…
Current microlensing surveys are sensitive to free-floating planets down to Earth-mass objects. All published microlensing events attributed to unbound planets were identified based on their short timescale (below two days), but lacked an…