Sentences with word «microlensing»

«Our new microlensing observations are in agreement with theoretical expectations on the frequency of free - floating Jupiters, and with infrared surveys for planetary - mass objects in star - forming regions,» says Przemek Mróz, lead author of the OGLE paper and an astronomer at the University of Warsaw Observatory in Poland.

Using a technique called microlensing, astronomers discovered a solar system 5,000 light - years away that contains smaller versions of our Jupiter and Saturn.

Since 1995, PLANET is an international collaboration searching for extrasolar planets via microlensing effects.

«Astrophysicists discover planets in extragalactic galaxies using microlensing.»

So researchers can subtract the unwanted effects of microlensing by working with colors instead of light curves.

While rare and hard to predict, when microlensing planets are detected they often provide insight into previously unexplored regimes of the exoplanet population.

The Hubble and Keck Observatory data are providing proof of concept for the primary method of exoplanet detection that will be used by NASA's planned, space - based Wide - Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), which will allow astronomers to determine the masses of planets found with microlensing.

Two microlensing surveys in the 1990s ruled out the possibility of swarms of black holes.

Gravitational microlensing works by a planetary body — or any body for that matter with significant mass, such as a brown dwarf or even a black hole — passing in front of a star.

Despite their name, MACHOs need not occur only in the galactic halo, so astronomers can search for them by looking for microlensing effects anywhere where there are large numbers of stars.

When he did, he was able to calculate the masses of the two stars and the planet, and their distances from one another — a feat that he says can only be done via microlensing.

The researchers studied six years of microlensing data from the two projects and estimated that extrasolar planets are the rule rather than the exception, with each star in the galaxy hosting an average of 1.6 planets.

According to Shvartzvald, Yee and their colleagues, OGLE -2016-BLG-1195Lb is the lowest mass world ever discovered through microlensing, a technique in which light from a star that passes in front of a bright background object causes the latter to appear brighter, thus allowing scientists to detect anomalies created by a planet orbiting in the foreground.

Mike Turner of Fermilab, Chicago, has already pointed out that the observed microlensing events seem to be too rare to fit the idea of a dark halo full of brown dwarfs.

Another survey, the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet), holds particular promise as it relies on three geographically distributed observatories rather than just one, allowing longer monitoring of target star fields that would otherwise be limited to no more than 10 hours due to the Earth's rotation.

In the case of OGLE -2016-BLG-1195Lb, the spike in brightness lasted only a few hours, but Shvartzvald and Yee were able to detect it using the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) survey at the University of Warsaw and track it using both the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet).

«WFIRST will make measurements like we have made for OGLE -2005-BLG-169 for virtually all the planetary microlensing events it observes.

«These chance alignments are rare, occurring only about once every 1 million years for a given planet, so it was thought that a very long wait would be required before the planetary microlensing signal could be confirmed,» said David Bennett, the lead of the team that analyzed the Hubble data.

The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) observes millions of stars every night with telescopes in Chile to find microlensing events.

But after running their simulations, Goldstein and Nugent found microlensing did not change the colors of strongly lensed Type Ia supernova in their early phases.

Such arguments over microlensing results are likely to grow in the immediate future, largely due to another new claim from OGLE that rivals the 2011 MOA result in potential for controversy.

But he cautions that the data are too sparse to prove unambiguously that microlensing caused the brightening.

Microlensing occurs when a foreground star passes close to our line of sight to a more distant background star.

Microlensing depends on a lot of patience and a lot of luck, but given enough time and enough stars, exoplanets can be discovered this way.

«Specifically, the observed X-ray polarization of a gravitationally microlensed quasar should vary rapidly with time if the gravitational Faraday effect indeed exists,» he said.

Experts — including members of the OGLE team — view the survey's claimed detections of such low - mass microlensing worlds with measured skepticism.

This composite of two astrophysics simulations shows a Type Ia supernova (purple disc) expanding over different microlensing magnification patterns (colored fields).

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The details of this particular microlensing event, the fourth the team has detected looking towards the LMC, have not yet been published.

Bin Chen, who works at the university's Research Computing Center, describes the yet - to - be-observed effect in the paper «Probing the Gravitational Faraday Rotation Using Quasar X-ray Microlensing,» published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

In this case, there were two separate microlensing events, one in 2008 that revealed the main star and suggested the presence of the planet, and one in 2010 that confirmed the presence of the planet and revealed the second star.

«Only microlensing can detect these cold ice giants that, like Uranus and Neptune, are far away from their host stars.

«This is an example of how powerful the techniques of analysis of extragalactic microlensing can be.

Jennifer Yee, an astronomer at the Harvard — Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and KMTNet team member, says that longer monitoring would make it easier to detect the signals of rogue Earths — and to distinguish them from confounding effects such as stellar flares, which can mimic ultrashort microlensing events.

NASA's Wide - Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), a sort of super-Hubble with a panoramic view, is planned for launch in the mid-2020s with an intensive microlensing survey as one of its main science objectives.

Results from other microlensing projects could corroborate or refute OGLE's claim in coming years.

The duration of an entire microlensing event is several months, while the variation in brightening due to a planet lasts a few hours to a couple of days.

Microlensing takes advantage of the random motion of stars, which are generally too small to be noticed without precise measurements.

Also expected in the near future is the Korean Microlensing Network (KMT - Net) that will operate telescopes in South Africa, Chile, and Australia using 1.6 meter telescopes covering 4 square degrees of the galactic bulge.

Kepler's transit detection method favors the detection of worlds orbiting close to their stars, whereas microlensing has no such restriction.

The initial microlensing data of OGLE -2005-BLG-169 had indicated a combined system of foreground and background stars plus a planet.

We also discovered a source of astrometric errors that might limit gravitational microlensing accuracy and fundamental astrometry.

Gravitational microlensing opens up the possibility of mapping the vast expanses of the entirety of the Milky Way to really study the distribution of planets across the galaxy and discover planet - type objects that can't be detected with any of the other planet - hunting methods that are currently being used.

Talk by JP Beaulieu in Memory of John Greenhill at the 19th microlensing conference in Annapolis in January 2015.