No Arabic abstract
Microlensing is a powerful tool for discovering cold exoplanets, and the The Roman Space Telescope microlensing survey will discover over 1000 such planets. Rapid, automated classification of Romans microlensing events can be used to prioritize follow-up observations of the most interesting events. Machine learning is now often used for classification problems in astronomy, but the success of such algorithms can rely on the definition of appropriate features that capture essential elements of the observations that can map to parameters of interest. In this paper, we introduce tools that we have developed to capture features in simulated Roman light curves of different types of microlensing events, and evaluate their effectiveness in classifying microlensing light curves. These features are quantified as parameters that can be used to decide the likelihood that a given light curve is due to a specific type of microlensing event. This method leaves us with a list of parameters that describe features like the smoothness of the peak, symmetry, the number of peaks, and width and height of small deviations from the main peak. This will allow us to quickly analyze a set of microlensing light curves and later use the resulting parameters as input to machine learning algorithms to classify the events.
Galactic microlensing datasets now comprise in excess of $10^4$ events, and with the advent of next generation microlensing surveys that may be undertaken with facilities such as the Rubin Observatory (formerly LSST) and Roman Space Telescope (formerly WFIRST), this number will increase significantly. So too will the fraction of events with measurable higher order information such as finite source effects and lens-source relative proper motion. Analysing such data requires a more sophisticated Galactic microlens modeling approach. We present a new second-generation Manchester-Besanc{c}on Microlensing Simulator (MaB$mu$lS-2), which uses a version of the Besanc{c}on population synthesis Galactic model that provides good agreement with stellar kinematics observed by HST towards the bulge. MaB$mu$lS-2 provides high-fidelity signal-to-noise limited maps of the microlensing optical depth, rate and average timescale towards a 400 sq. degree region of the Galactic bulge in several optical to near-infrared pass-bands. The maps take full account of the unresolved stellar background as well as limb-darkened source profiles. Comparing MaB$mu$lS-2 to the efficiency-corrected OGLE-IV 8,000 event sample shows a much improved agreement over the previous version of MaB$mu$lS, and succeeds in matching even small-scale structural features in the OGLE-IV event rate map. However, there remains evidence for a small under-prediction in the event rate per source and over-prediction in timescale. MaB$mu$lS-2 is available online (<www.mabuls.net>) to provide on-the-fly maps for user supplied cuts in survey magnitude, event timescale and relative proper motion.
We present the first short-duration candidate microlensing events from the Kepler K2 mission. From late April to early July 2016, Campaign 9 of K2 obtained high temporal cadence observations over a 3.7 square degree region of the Galactic bulge. Its primary objectives were to look for evidence of a free-floating planet (FFP) population using microlensing, and demonstrate the feasibility of space-based planetary microlensing surveys. Though Kepler K2 is far from optimal for microlensing, the recently developed MCPM photometric pipeline enables us to identify and model microlensing events. We describe our blind event-selection pipeline in detail and use it to recover 22 short-duration events with effective timescales of less than 10 days previously announced by the OGLE and KMTNet ground-based surveys. We also announce five new candidate events. One of these is a caustic-crossing binary event, consistent with a bound planet and modelled as such in a companion study. The other four have very short durations (effective timescales less than 0.1 days) typical of an Earth-mass FFP population. Whilst Kepler was not designed for crowded-field photometry, the K2C9 dataset clearly demonstrates the feasibility of conducting blind space-based microlensing surveys towards the Galactic bulge.
We search for microlensing planets with signals exhibiting no caustic-crossing features, considering the possibility that such signals may be missed due to their weak and featureless nature. For this purpose, we reexamine the lensing events found by the KMTNet survey before the 2019 season. From this investigation, we find two new planetary lensing events, KMT-2018-BLG-1976 and KMT-2018-BLG-1996. We also present the analysis of the planetary event OGLE-2019-BLG-0954, for which the planetary signal was known, but no detailed analysis has been presented before. We identify the genuineness of the planetary signals by checking various interpretations that can generate short-term anomalies in lensing light curves. From Bayesian analyses conducted with the constraint from available observables, we find that the host and planet masses are $(M_1, M_2)sim (0.65~M_odot, 2~M_{rm J})$ for KMT-2018-BLG-1976L, $sim (0.69~M_odot, 1~M_{rm J})$ for KMT-2018-BLG-1996L, and $sim (0.80~M_odot, 14~M_{rm J})$ for OGLE-2019-BLG-0954L. The estimated distance to OGLE-2019-BLG-0954L, $3.63^{+1.22}_{-1.64}$~kpc, indicates that it is located in the disk, and the brightness expected from the mass and distance matches well the brightness of the blend, indicating that the lens accounts for most of the blended flux. The lens of OGLE-2019-BLG-0954 could be resolved from the source by conducting high-resolution follow-up observations in and after 2024.
MOA-2006-BLG-074 was selected as one of the most promising planetary candidates in a retrospective analysis of the MOA collaboration: its asymmetric high-magnification peak can be perfectly explained by a source passing across a central caustic deformed by a small planet. However, after a detailed analysis of the residuals, we have realized that a single lens and a source orbiting with a faint companion provides a more satisfactory explanation for all the observed deviations from a Paczynski curve and the only physically acceptable interpretation. Indeed the orbital motion of the source is constrained enough to allow a very good characterization of the binary source from the microlensing light curve. The case of MOA-2006-BLG-074 suggests that the so-called xallarap effect must be taken seriously in any attempts to obtain accurate planetary demographics from microlensing surveys.
When a planet occults a spotty area on a stellar surface, the flux increases and a characteristic feature in a light curve - a bump - is observed. Among the planets detected by the CoRoT-mission CoRoT-18 is especially interesting as it exhibited spot crossings that we have analysed in detail. We used four ground-based observations obtained at a 1.5-m telescope in Spain and the 13 available CoRoT-transits to refine and constrain stellar, planetary and geometrical parameters of the system. We found that the derived physical properties slightly deviate from the previously published values, most likely due to the different treatment of the stellar activity. Following a spot over several transits enabled us to measure the stellar rotation period and the spin-orbit alignment. Our derived values of Prot=5.19 +/- 0.03 d and Lambda=6 +/- 13 deg are in agreement with the literature values that were obtained with other methods. Although we cannot exclude a very old age for CoRoT-18, our observations support the young star hypothesis and, hence, yield constraints on the time-scale of planet formation and migration.