The Detection of Terrestrial Planets via Gravitational Microlensing: Space vs. Ground-based Surveys

Details The Detection of Terrestrial Planets via Gravitational Microlensing: Space vs. Ground-based Surveys The Detection of Terrestrial Planets via Gravitational Microlensing: Space vs. Ground-based Surveys

2004-04-05

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0404075v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

8 pages with 13 included postscript figures. To Appear in the Proceedings of the XIXth IAP Colloquium, "Extrasolar Planets Tod

Scientific paper

I compare an aggressive ground-based gravitational microlensing survey for terrestrial planets to a space-based survey. The Ground-based survey assumes a global network of very wide field-of-view ~2m telescopes that monitor fields in the central Galactic bulge. I find that such a space-based survey is ~100 times more effective at detecting terrestrial planets in Earth-like orbits. The poor sensitivity of the ground-based surveys to low-mass planets is primarily due to the fact that the main sequence source stars are unresolved in ground-based images of the Galactic bulge. This gives rise to systematic photometry errors that preclude the detection of most of the planetary light curve deviations for low mass planets.

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