Related papers: Detecting Planets Through Microlensing
If the Galaxy contains ~10^{11}M_sol in cold gas clouds of ~Jovian mass and \~AU size, these clouds will act as converging lenses for optical light, magnifying background stars at a detectable rate. The resulting light curves can resemble…
Microlensing events are now regularly being detected by monitoring the flux of a large number of potential sources and measuring the combined magnification of the images. This phenomenon could also be detected directly from the…
Much interest has been generated recently by the ongoing MACHO, EROS and OGLE projects to identify gravitationally lensed stars from the Large Magellanic Cloud and Galactic bulge, and the positive identification of several events (Alcock et…
This paper is devoted to exploring how we can discover and study nearby (< 1-2 kpc) planetary and binary systems by observing their action as gravitational lenses. Lensing can extend the realm of nearby binaries and planets that can be…
We study the benefits of polarimetry observations of microlensing events to detect and characterize circumstellar disks around the microlensed stars located at the Galactic bulge. These disks which are unresolvable from their host stars…
We report the discovery of a several-Jupiter mass planetary companion to the primary lens star in microlensing event OGLE-2005-BLG-071. Precise (<1%) photometry at the peak of the event yields an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio…
Current gravitational microlensing surveys are observing hundreds of millions of stars in the Galactic bulge - which makes finding rare microlensing events a challenging tasks. In almost all previous works, microlensing events have been…
A large number of microlensing events have been observed in the direction of the Galactic bulge, with a measured optical depth in the range 2 - 3 x 10^{-6}. It has been shown that most of these events are due to bulge stars being lensed by…
Are microlensing searches likely to discover planets that harbor life? Given our present state of knowledge, this is a difficult question to answer. We therefore begin by asking a more narrowly focused question: are conditions on planets…
We present the analysis of the first two years of the OGLE search for gravitational lenses towards the Galactic bulge. We detected 9 microlensing events in an algorithmic search of $ \sim 10^8 $ measurements of $ \sim 10^6 $ stars. The…
Galactic bulges are central to understanding galaxy formation and evolution. Here we report on recent studies using micro-lensing events to obtain spectra of high resolution and moderately high signal-to-noise ratios of dwarf stars in the…
Free-floating planets are recently drawing a special interest of the scientific community. Gravitational microlensing is up to now the exclusive method for the investigation of free-floating planets, including their spatial distribution…
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…
Simulations of planetary microlensing at high magnification that were carried out on a cluster computer are presented. It was found that the perturbations due to two-thirds of all planets occur in the time interval [-0.5t_FWHM, 0.5t_ FWHM]…
We report the detection of 45 candidate microlensing events in fields toward the Galactic bulge. These come from the analysis of 24 fields containing 12.6 million stars observed for 190 days in 1993. Many of these events are of extremely…
Microlensing events are usually selected among single-peaked non-repeating light curves in order to avoid confusion with variable stars. However, a microlensing event may exhibit a second microlensing brightening episode when the source…
We present observations of 8 Galactic Bulge microlensing events taken with the 1.0m JKT on La Palma during 2000 June and July. The JKT observing schedule was optimized using a prioritizing algorithm to automatically update the target list.…
We describe a real-time spectroscopic program to observe bright gravitational microlensing events toward the Galactic Bulge. The program is carried out using the NTT at ESO. We present the preliminary analysis of the microlensing events we…
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…
We analyze an ensemble of microlensing events from the 2015 Spitzer microlensing campaign, all of which were densely monitored by ground-based high-cadence survey teams. The simultaneous observations from Spitzer and the ground yield…