English

Two new free-floating or wide-orbit planets from microlensing

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2019-02-27 v2

Abstract

Planet formation theories predict the existence of free-floating planets that have been ejected from their parent systems. Although they emit little or no light, they can be detected during gravitational microlensing events. Microlensing events caused by rogue planets are characterized by very short timescales tEt_{\rm E} (typically below two days) and small angular Einstein radii θE\theta_{\rm E} (up to several uas). Here we present the discovery and characterization of two ultra-short microlensing events identified in data from the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) survey, which may have been caused by free-floating or wide-orbit planets. OGLE-2012-BLG-1323 is one of the shortest events discovered thus far (tEt_{\rm E}=0.155 +/- 0.005 d, θE\theta_{\rm E}=2.37 +/- 0.10 uas) and was caused by an Earth-mass object in the Galactic disk or a Neptune-mass planet in the Galactic bulge. OGLE-2017-BLG-0560 (tEt_{\rm E}=0.905 +/- 0.005 d, θE\theta_{\rm E}=38.7 +/- 1.6 uas) was caused by a Jupiter-mass planet in the Galactic disk or a brown dwarf in the bulge. We rule out stellar companions up to a distance of 6.0 and 3.9 au, respectively. We suggest that the lensing objects, whether located on very wide orbits or free-floating, may originate from the same physical mechanism. Although the sample of ultrashort microlensing events is small, these detections are consistent with low-mass wide-orbit or unbound planets being more common than stars in the Milky Way.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.00441,
  title  = {Two new free-floating or wide-orbit planets from microlensing},
  author = {P. Mroz and A. Udalski and D. P. Bennett and Y. -H. Ryu and T. Sumi and Y. Shvartzvald and J. Skowron and R. Poleski and P. Pietrukowicz and S. Kozlowski and M. K. Szymanski and L. Wyrzykowski and I. Soszynski and K. Ulaczyk and K. Rybicki and P. Iwanek and M. D. Albrow and S. -J. Chung and A. Gould and C. Han and K. -H. Hwang and Y. K. Jung and I. -G. Shin and J. C. Yee and W. Zang and S. -M. Cha and D. -J. Kim and H. -W. Kim and S. -L. Kim and C. -U. Lee and D. -J. Lee and Y. Lee and B. -G. Park and R. W. Pogge and F. Abe and R. Barry and A. Bhattacharya and I. A. Bond and M. Donachie and A. Fukui and Y. Hirao and Y. Itow and K. Kawasaki and I. Kondo and N. Koshimoto and M. C. A. Li and Y. Matsubara and Y. Muraki and S. Miyazaki and M. Nagakane and C. Ranc and N. J. Rattenbury and H. Suematsu and D. J. Sullivan and D. Suzuki and P. J. Tristram and A. Yonehara and D. Maoz and S. Kaspi and M. Friedmann},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.00441},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

accepted for publication in A&A, minor changes

R2 v1 2026-06-23T05:00:50.369Z