Related papers: Detecting Planets Through Microlensing
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…
To move one step forward toward a Galactic distribution of planets, we present the first planet sensitivity analysis for microlensing events with simultaneous observations from space and the ground. We present this analysis for two such…
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…
If stars at the lower end of the main sequence are responsible for the microlensing events observed in the Galactic bulge, then light from the lensing star contributes to the observed brightness. The background and lensing stars generally…
Due to their extremely small luminosity compared to the stars they orbit, planets outside our own Solar System are extraordinarily difficult to detect directly in optical light. Careful photometric monitoring of distant stars, however, can…
The MACHO project carries out regular photometric monitoring of millions of stars in the Magellanic Clouds and Galactic Bulge, to search for very rare gravitational microlensing events due to compact objects in the galactic halo and disk. A…
It has been shown by Paczy\'nski that gravitational microlensing is potentially a useful method for detecting the dark constituents of the halo of our galaxy, if their mass lies in the approximate domain $10^{-6} < M/M_{\odot} < 10^{-1}$.…
Microlensing planets occurring on faint source stars can escape detection due to their weak signals. Occasionally, detections of such planets are not reported due to the difficulty of extracting high-profile scientific issues on the…
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…
With its planet detection efficiency reaching a maximum for orbital radii between 1 and 10 AU, microlensing provides a unique sensitivity to planetary systems similar to our own around galactic and even extragalactic stars acting as lenses…
Microlensing campaigns have a long history of observations covering the Galactic bulge, where thousands of detections have been obtained, including many exoplanetary systems. The Euclid Galactic Bulge Survey represents a unique opportunity…
Pixel lensing is gravitational microlensing of unresolved stars. The main target explored up to now has been the nearby galaxy of Andromeda, M31. The scientific issues of interest are the search for dark matter in form of compact halo…
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…
Ongoing microlensing surveys have already yielded more than five hundred microlensing events, most of which have been identified in real-time. In this review I present the basic theory and observational status of these surveys. I highlight…
Are there other planetary systems in our Universe? Indirect evidence has been found for planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy: the gravity of orbiting planets makes the star wobble, and the resulting periodic Doppler shifts have been…
Microlensing observations have now become a useful tool in searching for non--luminous astrophysical compact objects (brown dwarfs, faint stars, neutron stars, black holes and even planets). Originally conceived for establishing whether the…
Foundations of standard theory of microlensing are described, namely we consider microlensing stars in Galactic bulge, the Magellanic Clouds or other nearby galaxies. We suppose that gravitational microlenses lie between an Earth observer…
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…
Extra-solar planets can be efficiently detected in gravitational microlensing events of high magnification. High accuracy photometry is required over a short, well-defined time interval only, of order 10-30 hours. Most planets orbiting the…
We introduce a new method of searching for and characterizing extra-solar planets. We show that by monitoring the center-of-light motion of microlensing alerts using the next generation of high precision astrometric instruments the…