24-November-2006, 09:08 PM
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Junior Member
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Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Belgrade, Serbia
Posts: 27
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Making plans for MPF: new perspectives for gravitational microlensing
Quote:
A way to better characterize planets and planet host stars discovered by gravitational microlensing has been proposed by a group of scientists from USA. One of the primary strengths of this detection method is its sensitivity to low-mass planets at small separations. Two of the lowest mass extrasolar planets known (OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb and OGLE-2005-BLG-169Lb) have been discovered by using this technique.
The gravitational microlensing light curves that reveal the presence of extrasolar planets generally yield the planet-star mass ratio and separation in units of the Einstein ring radius. The scientists show in this paper that in many cases, the lens stars are readily detectable with high resolution space-based follow-up observations, which can be used for determining the masses of the planet and its host star. For OGLE-2005-BLG-169Lb, they show that the lens star will definitely be detectable with observations by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) unless it is a stellar remnant.
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