WFIRST Exoplanet Science

Details WFIRST Exoplanet Science WFIRST Exoplanet Science

Jan 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21743220c&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #217, #432.20; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Scientific paper

The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) is a NASA space observatory that will be capable of making a statistical census of extrasolar planets down to mass 0.1 Mearth, at star-planet separations beyond 0.5 AU, via planetary microlensing. By staring at a field in the galactic bulge, its wide-field infrared camera will detect planets orbiting foreground (lens) stars as they pass in front of more distant 'source' stars in the bulge. The foreground star-planet system magnifies the flux of the bulge star in time, and the mass and separation of the planet can be measured from the distinctive shape of the time-resolved light curve.
We determine the number of planets that WFIRST is expected to find, in logarithmic bins of planet mass from 0.1 Mearth to Mjupiter, as a function of the fraction of mission time devoted to a microlensing planet search. From these results, we determine how well the WFIRST exoplanet results can constrain a power-law planet mass distribution.

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