Dijana Dominis - Searching for extrasolar planets with gravitational microlensing

Wednesday 25 Sep 2019, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Madrid

Seminar (IFAE)

Marc Manera (IFAE), Pere Masjuan (IFAE), Stefano Terzo (IFAE)

Since the first discoveries of extrasolar planets in early 90-ies, a large number of exoplanet discoveries has been announced and published, using different astrophysical methods. But what did we actually learn about them? 

Despite of the relatively small fraction in the overall number of discoveries, the method of gravitational microlensing using ground-based optical telescopes has yielded some of most exciting results in the field, such as discovery of the first "Earth-like" (cold solid low-mass) exoplanet, first statistics of mass distribution of planets in the Milky Way, detections of free-floating planets, and precise mass measurement of an exoplanet. 

A brief overview of different exoplanet searching methods will be given it the talk, with emphasis on the highlight results obtained by the PLANET (Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork) telescope network.