No Arabic abstract
For all exoplanet candidates, the reliability of a claimed detection needs to be assessed through a careful study of systematic errors in the data to minimize the false positives rate. We present a method to investigate such systematics in microlensing datasets using the microlensing event OGLE-2013-BLG-0446 as a case study. The event was observed from multiple sites around the world and its high magnification (A_{max} sim 3000) allowed us to investigate the effects of terrestrial and annual parallax. Real-time modeling of the event while it was still ongoing suggested the presence of an extremely low-mass companion (sim 3M_oplus ) to the lensing star, leading to substantial follow-up coverage of the light curve. We test and compare different models for the light curve and conclude that the data do not favour the planetary interpretation when systematic errors are taken into account.
Characterizing a microlensing planet is done from modeling an observed lensing light curve. In this process, it is often confronted that solutions of different lensing parameters result in similar light curves, causing difficulties in uniquely interpreting the lens system, and thus understanding the causes of different types of degeneracy is important. In this work, we show that incomplete coverage of a planetary perturbation can result in degenerate solutions even for events where the planetary signal is detected with a high level of statistical significance. We demonstrate the degeneracy for an actually observed event OGLE-2012-BLG-0455/MOA-2012-BLG-206. The peak of this high-magnification event $(A_{rm max}sim400)$ exhibits very strong deviation from a point-lens model with $Deltachi^{2}gtrsim4000$ for data sets with a total number of measurement 6963. From detailed modeling of the light curve, we find that the deviation can be explained by four distinct solutions, i.e., two very different sets of solutions, each with a two-fold degeneracy. While the two-fold (so-called close/wide) degeneracy is well-understood, the degeneracy between the radically different solutions is not previously known. The model light curves of this degeneracy differ substantially in the parts that were not covered by observation, indicating that the degeneracy is caused by the incomplete coverage of the perturbation. It is expected that the frequency of the degeneracy introduced in this work will be greatly reduced with the improvement of the current lensing survey and follow-up experiments and the advent of new surveys.
We report a giant exoplanet discovery in the microlensing event OGLE-2017-BLG-1049, which is a planet-host star mass ratio of $q=9.53pm0.39times10^{-3}$ and has a caustic crossing feature in the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet) observations. The caustic crossing feature yields an angular Einstein radius of $theta_{rm E}=0.52 pm 0.11 {rm mas}$. However, the microlens parallax is not measured because of the time scale of the event $t_{rm E}simeq 29 {rm days}$, which is not long enough in this case to determine the microlens parallax. Thus, we perform a Bayesian analysis to estimate physical quantities of the lens system. From this, we find that the lens system has a star with mass $M_{rm h}=0.55^{+0.36}_{-0.29} M_{odot}$ hosting a giant planet with $M_{rm p}=5.53^{+3.62}_{-2.87} M_{rm Jup}$, at a distance of $D_{rm L}=5.67^{+1.11}_{-1.52} {rm kpc}$. The projected star-planet separation in units of the Einstein radius $(theta_{rm E})$ corresponding to the total mass of the lens system is $a_{perp}=3.92^{+1.10}_{-1.32} rm{au}$. This means that the planet is located beyond the snow line of the host. The relative lens-source proper motion is $mu_{rm rel}sim 7 rm{mas yr^{-1}}$, thus the lens and source will be separated from each other within 10 years. Then the flux of the host star can be measured by a 30m class telescope with high-resolution imaging in the future, and thus its mass can be determined.
We present observations of the unusual microlensing event OGLE 2003-BLG-235/MOA 2003-BLG-53. In this event a short duration (~7 days) low amplitude deviation in the light curve due a single lens profile was observed in both the MOA and OGLE survey observations. We find that the observed features of the light curve can only be reproduced using a binary microlensing model with an extreme (planetary) mass ratio of 0.0039 +/- (11, 07) for the lensing system. If the lens system comprises a main sequence primary, we infer that the secondary is a planet of about 1.5 Jupiter masses with an orbital radius of ~3 AU.
We present the analyses of two microlensing events, OGLE-2018-BLG-0567 and OGLE-2018-BLG-0962. In both events, the short-lasting anomalies were densely and continuously covered by two high-cadence surveys. The light-curve modeling indicates that the anomalies are generated by source crossings over the planetary caustics induced by planetary companions to the hosts. The estimated planet/host separation (scaled to the angular Einstein radius $theta_{rm E}$) and mass ratio are $(s, q) = (1.81, 1.24times10^{-3})$ and $(s, q) = (1.25, 2.38times10^{-3})$, respectively. From Bayesian analyses, we estimate the host and planet masses as $(M_{rm h}, M_{rm p}) = (0.24_{-0.13}^{+0.16},M_{odot}, 0.32_{-0.16}^{+0.34},M_{rm J})$ and $(M_{rm h}, M_{rm p}) = (0.55_{-0.29}^{+0.32},M_{odot}, 1.37_{-0.72}^{+0.80},M_{rm J})$, respectively. These planetary systems are located at a distance of $7.07_{-1.15}^{+0.93},{rm kpc}$ for OGLE-2018-BLG-0567 and $6.47_{-1.73}^{+1.04},{rm kpc}$ for OGLE-2018-BLG-0962, suggesting that they are likely to be near the Galactic bulge. The two events prove the capability of current high-cadence surveys for finding planets through the planetary-caustic channel. We find that most published planetary-caustic planets are found in Hollywood events in which the source size strongly contributes to the anomaly cross section relative to the size of the caustic.
We present the analysis of planetary microlensing event MOA-2011-BLG-291, which has a mass ratio of $q=(3.8pm0.7)times10^{-4}$ and a source star that is redder (or brighter) than the bulge main sequence. This event is located at a low Galactic latitude in the survey area that is currently planned for NASAs WFIRST exoplanet microlensing survey. This unusual color for a microlensed source star implies that we cannot assume that the source star is in the Galactic bulge. The favored interpretation is that the source star is a lower main sequence star at a distance of $D_S=4.9pm1.3,$kpc in the Galactic disk. However, the source could also be a turn-off star on the far side of the bulge or a sub-giant in the far side of the Galactic disk if it experiences significantly more reddening than the bulge red clump stars. However, these possibilities have only a small effect on our mass estimates for the host star and planet. We find host star and planet masses of $M_{rm host} =0.15^{+0.27}_{-0.10}M_odot$ and $m_p=18^{+34}_{-12}M_oplus$ from a Bayesian analysis with a standard Galactic model under the assumption that the planet hosting probability does not depend on the host mass or distance. However, if we attempt to measure the host and planet masses with host star brightness measurements from high angular resolution follow-up imaging, the implied masses will be sensitive to the host star distance. The WFIRST exoplanet microlensing survey is expected to use this method to determine the masses for many of the planetary systems that it discovers, so this issue has important design implications for the WFIRST exoplanet microlensing survey.