Gravitational microlensing offers a means of determining directly the masses of objects ranging from planets to stars, provided that the distances and motions of the lenses and sources can be determined. A globular cluster observed against the dense stellar field of the Galactic bulge presents ideal conditions for such observations because the probability of lensing is high and the distances and kinematics of the lenses and sources are well constrained. The abundance of low-mass objects in a globular cluster is of particular interest, because it may be representative of the very early stages of star formation in the Universe, and therefore indicative of the amount of dark baryonic matter in such clusters. Here we report a microlensing event associated with the globular cluster M22. We determine the mass of the lens to be 0.13(+0.03)(-0.02) solar masses. We have also detected six events that are unresolved in time. If these are also microlensing events, they imply that a non-negligible fraction of the cluster mass resides in the form of free-floating planetary-mass objects.
We complete the analysis of all 2018 prime-field microlensing planets identified by the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet) Anomaly Finder. Among the ten previously unpublished events with clear planetary solutions, eight are either unambiguously planetary or are very likely to be planetary in nature: OGLE-2018-BLG-1126, KMT-2018-BLG-2004, OGLE-2018-BLG-1647, OGLE-2018-BLG-1367, OGLE-2018-BLG-1544, OGLE-2018-BLG-0932, OGLE-2018-BLG-1212, and KMT-2018-BLG-2718. Combined with the four previously published new Anomaly Finder events and 12 previously published (or in preparation) planets that were discovered by eye, this makes a total of 24 2018 prime-field planets discovered or recovered by Anomaly Finder. Together with a paper in preparation on 2018 subprime planets, this work lays the basis for the first statistical analysis of the planet mass-ratio function based on planets identified in KMTNet data. By systematically applying the heuristic analysis to each event, we identified the small modification in their formalism that is needed to unify the so-called close-wide and inner-outer degeneracies.
Microlensing is the only known direct method to measure the masses of stars that lack visible companions. In terms of microlensing observables, the mass is given by M ¼ (c 2 =4G )r E E and so requires the measurement of both the angular Einstein radius E and the projected Einstein radiusr E . Simultaneous measurement of these two parameters is extremely rare. Here we analyze OGLE-2003-BLG-238, a spectacularly bright (I min ¼ 10:3), highmagnification (A max ¼ 170) microlensing event. Pronounced finite-source effects permit a measurement of E ¼ 650 as. Although the timescale of the event is only t E ¼ 38 days, one can still obtain weak constraints on the microlens parallax: 4:4 AU
In order to exhume the buried signatures of "missing planetary caustics" in the KMTNet data, we conducted a systematic anomaly search to the residuals from point-source point-lens fits, based on a modified version of the KMTNet EventFinder algorithm. This search reveals the lowest mass-ratio planetary caustic to date in the microlensing event OGLE-2019-BLG-1053, for which the planetary signal had not been noticed before. The planetary system has a planet-host mass ratio of q = (1.25±0.13)×10 −5 . A Bayesian analysis yields estimates of the mass of the host star, M host = 0.61 +0.29 −0.24 M , the mass of its planet, M planet = 2.48 +1.19 −0.98 M ⊕ , the projected planet-host separation, a ⊥ = 3.4 +0.5 −0.5 au, and the lens distance of D L = 6.8 +0.6 −0.9 kpc. The discovery of this very low mass-ratio planet illustrates the utility of our method and opens a new window for a large and homogeneous sample to study the microlensing planet-host mass-ratio function down to q ∼ 10 −5 .
We report the complete statistical planetary sample from the prime fields (Γ ≥ 2 hr−1) of the 2019 Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet) microlensing survey. We develop the optimized KMTNet AnomalyFinder algorithm and apply it to the 2019 KMTNet prime fields. We find a total of 13 homogeneously selected planets and report the analysis of three planetary events, KMT-2019-BLG-(1042,1552,2974). The planet-host mass ratios, q, for the three planetary events are 6.34 × 10−4, 4.89 × 10−3 and 6.18 × 10−4, respectively. A Bayesian analysis indicates the three planets are all cold giant planets beyond the snow line of their host stars. The 13 planets are basically uniform in log q over the range −5.0 < log q < −1.5. This result suggests that the planets below qbreak = 1.7 × 10−4 proposed by the MOA-II survey may be more common than previously believed. This work is an early component of a large project to determine the KMTNet mass-ratio function, and the whole sample of 2016–2019 KMTNet events should contain about 120 planets.
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