Expectations from a Microlensing Search for Planets

Details Expectations from a Microlensing Search for Planets Expectations from a Microlensing Search for Planets

Sep 1996

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996dps....28.1203p&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #28, #12.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 28, p.1111

Statistics

Scientific paper

The distribution of planetary masses about stars between the Sun and the center of the galaxy is constrained to within a factor of three relative to a mean distribution by an intensive search for planets during microlensing events. Projected separations normalized by the lens Einstein ring radius yield a rough estimate of the distribution of planetary semimajor axes with planetary mass. The search consists of following ongoing microlensing events involving sources in the center of the galaxy lensed by intervening stars with high time resolution, 1% photometry in an attempt to catch any short time scale planetary perturbations of the otherwise smooth light curve. It is assumed that 3000 events are followed over an 8 year period of time, but with half of the lenses, those that are members of binary systems, devoid of planets. The remaining 1500 lenses have solar-system-like distributions of 4 or 5 planets. The expectations from the microlensing search are extremely assumption dependent with 32, 73, and 47 planets being detected for three sets of assumptions involving how the planetary masses and separations vary with lens mass. The events can be covered only 50% of the time by high time resolution photometry from a system of three or four dedicated telescopes distributed in longitude, so half of the detectable planetary perturbations are missed. The ground based observational technique is robust, and meaningful statistics on planetary masses and separations can be inferred from such an intensive search, although these statistics, like the inferred data set, will also be dependent on the assumptions about the nature of the set of planetary systems.

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