Related papers: Expectations from a Microlensing Search for Planet…
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.…
We describe a new method to search for gravitational microlensing toward the Galactic bulge that employs a small camera rather than a conventional telescope and probes new regions of parameter space. The small aperture (~65 mm) permits…
Up to date, only 13 firmly established triple microlensing events have been discovered, so the occurrence rates of microlensing two-planet systems and planets in binary systems are still uncertain. With the upcoming space-based microlensing…
(abridged) The study of other worlds is key to understanding our own, and not only provides clues to the origin of our civilization, but also looks into its future. Rather than in identifying nearby systems and learning about their…
We compare potential state-of-the-art experiments for detecting Earth-mass planets around main-sequence stars using radial velocities, transits, astrometry, and microlensing. For conventionally-discussed signal-to-noise ratio (S/N)…
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 describe the results of a search for microlensing events affecting stars in the outer bulge and inner disk of M31, due both to masses in M31 and the Galaxy. These observations, from 1994 and 1995 on the Vatican Advanced Technology…
Microlensing is one of the most promising methods of reconstructing the stellar mass function down to masses even below the hydrogen-burning limit. The fundamental limit to this technique is the presence of unresolved binaries, which can in…
Over the past decade, microlensing has developed into a powerful tool to study stellar astrophysics, especially stellar atmospheres, stellar masses, and binarity. I review this progress. Stellar atmospheres can be probed whenever the source…
Gravitational lensing provides a means to measure mass that does not rely on detecting and analysing light from the lens itself. Compact objects are ideal gravitational lenses, because they have relatively large masses and are dim. In this…
The Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork (PLANET) is a worldwide collaboration of astronomers using semi-dedicated European, South African, and Australian telescopes to perform continuous, rapid and precise multi-band CCD photometric…
Among the methods proposed to detect extrasolar planets, microlensing is the only technique that can detect free-floating planets. Free-floating planets are detected through the channel of short-duration isolated lensing events. However, if…
Microlensing is a proven extrasolar planet search method that has already yielded the detection of four exoplanets. These detections have changed our understanding of planet formation ``beyond the snowline'' by demonstrating that…
The search for extrasolar Earth-like planets is underway. Over 100 extrasolar giant planets are known to orbit nearby sun-like stars, including several in multiple-planet systems. These planetary systems are stepping stones for the search…
We report on our search for microlensing towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Analysis of 5.7 years of photometry on 11.9 million stars in the LMC reveals 13 - 17 microlensing events. This is significantly more than the $\sim$ 2 to 4…
We consider the mass distribution of the nine unseen companions orbiting solar-type stars with minimum possible masses in the planetary mass range reported as of March 1998. We compare the mass distribution of these nine extrasolar planet…
[abridged] WFIRST is uniquely capable of finding planets with masses as small as Mars at separations comparable to Jupiter, i.e., beyond the current ice lines of their stars. These planets fall between the close-in planets found by Kepler…
This paper presents an investigation into the gravitational microlensing of quasars by stars and stellar remnants in the Milky Way. We present predictions for the all-sky microlensing optical depth, time-scale distributions and event rates…
It is conventional to calculate the probability of microlensing for a cosmologically distant source based on the Press-Gunn approximation that the lensing objects are uniformly and randomly distributed in the intervening space with a…
Gravitational microlensing is a robust tool to detect and directly measure the abundance and mass of any kind of compact objects, either in our galaxy or in the extragalatic domain. On basis to generic, broadly applicable arguments, it is…