Exploring the free-floating planet population with gravitational microlensing

Speaker and affiliation: 
Przemysław Mróz (Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics California Institute of Technology)
Date: 
Tue, 2020-11-24 16:00 to 17:00
Venue: 
https://www.gotomeet.me/NCBJmeetings/seminarium-astrofizyczne
Abstract: 

Thousands of extrasolar planets have been discovered up to date. Although many of the known exoplanets do not resemble those in our solar system, they have one thing in common - they all orbit a star. However, theories of planet formation and evolution predict the existence of free-floating planets, gravitationally unattached to any star.

Gravitational microlensing is uniquely suited for finding free-floating planets. I will present the current constraints on the frequency and properties of rogue planets in the Milky Way based on long-term observations of microlensing events in the Galactic bulge by the OGLE sky survey. I will also present several of the most promising candidate free-floating planets discovered to date. Finally, I will briefly discuss the future prospects for determining the frequency and mass function of rogue planets by the planned microlensing experiments.

 

 

 

         

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