Microlensing Searches for Exoplanets

Yiannis Tsapras
(Submitted on 5 Oct 2018)

Gravitational microlensing finds planets through their gravitational influence on the light coming from a more distant background star. The presence of the planet is then inferred from the tell-tale brightness variations of the background star during the lensing event, even if no light is detectable from the planet or the host foreground star. This review covers fundamental theoretical concepts in microlensing, addresses how observations are performed in practice, the~challenges of obtaining accurate measurements, and explains how planets reveal themselves in the data. It~concludes with a presentation of the most important findings to-date, a description of the method’s strengths and weaknesses, and a discussion of the future prospects of microlensing.

Comments:    35 pages,9 figures, invited review for Geosciences Special Issue “Detection and Characterization of Extrasolar Planets”
Subjects:    Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability (physics.data-an)

Journal reference:    Geosciences, 2018, 8(10), 365
DOI:    10.3390/geosciences8100365
Cite as:    arXiv:1810.02691 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1810.02691v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Yiannis Tsapras [view email]
[v1] Fri, 5 Oct 2018 14:00:32 GMT (1063kb,D)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.02691