Résumé / Abstract Seminaire_IAP
« Microlensing: Measuring the Galactic Distribution of Planets »

Andrew Gould
Department of Astronomy, Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio, Etats-Unis d'Amérique)

Microlensing has discovered 13 planets, including the first "cold Neptunes", the first Sun/Jupiter/Saturn analog, the least massive planet, and the heaviest planet orbiting an M dwarf. A great strength of microlensing is that it does not depend on photons from the host star, and so probes classes
of planets not accessible to other techniques. Originally,
this was also considered a great weakness: since the host cannot be seen, we generally did not be expect to be able to determine its mass and distance. I show that masses and distances have nevertheless been measured for the majority of planets discovered to date. In particular, we can determine which are in the Galactic disk vs the Galactic bulge. I report a very surprising initial result from this observed distribution of distances.
vendredi 23 janvier 2009 - 11:00
Salle des séminaires Évry Schatzman, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris
Page web du séminaire / Seminar's webpage