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    Microlensing tagged posts

    AI reveals unsuspected Math underlying Search for Exoplanets

    May 25, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space, Physics

    chart explaining gravitational microlensing
    This infographic explains the light curve astronomers detect when viewing a microlensing event, and the signature of an exoplanet: an additional uptick in brightness when the exoplanet lenses the background star. (Image Credit: NASA / ESA / K. Sahu / STScI)

    Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms trained on real astronomical observations now outperform astronomers in sifting through massive amounts of data to find new exploding stars, identify new types of galaxies and detect the mergers of massive stars, accelerating the rate of new discovery in the world’s oldest science.

    But AI, also called machine learning, can reveal something deeper, University of California, Berkeley, astronomers found: Unsuspected connections hidden in the complex mathematics arising from general relativity—...

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    Astrophysicists discover Planets in Extragalactic Galaxies using Microlensing

    February 3, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Image of the gravitational lens RX J1131-1231 galaxy with the lens galaxy at the center and four lensed background quasars. It is estimated that there are trillions of planets in the center elliptical galaxy in this image. Credit: University of Oklahoma

    Image of the gravitational lens RX J1131-1231 galaxy with the lens galaxy at the center and four lensed background quasars. It is estimated that there are trillions of planets in the center elliptical galaxy in this image. Credit: University of Oklahoma

    A University of Oklahoma astrophysics team has discovered for the first time a population of planets beyond the Milky Way galaxy. Using microlensing – an astronomical phenomenon and the only known method capable of discovering planets at truly great distances from the Earth among other detection techniques – OU researchers were able to detect objects in extragalactic galaxies that range from the mass of the Moon to the mass of Jupiter.

    Xinyu Dai, professor in the Homer L...

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    NASA Space Telescopes Pinpoint elusive Brown Dwarf

    November 16, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This illustration depicts a newly discovered brown dwarf, an object that weighs in somewhere between our solar system's most massive planet (Jupiter) and the least-massive known star. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

    This illustration depicts a newly discovered brown dwarf, an object that weighs in somewhere between our solar system’s most massive planet (Jupiter) and the least-massive known star. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

    In a first-of-its-kind collaboration, NASA’s Spitzer and Swift space telescopes joined forces to observe a microlensing event, when a distant star brightens due to the gravitational field of at least one foreground cosmic object. This technique is useful for finding low-mass bodies orbiting stars, such as planets. In this case, the observations revealed a brown dwarf.

    Brown dwarfs are thought to be the missing link between planets and stars, with masses up to 80 times that of Jupiter...

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    Hypervariable Galactic Nuclei

    October 31, 2016, Categories  Uncategorized

    A photo of the PanSTARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System) telescope in Hawaii. Astronomers have used a sky survey from this facility to identify a of blue, hypervariable galaxies; the origin of the variability is uncertain but might in some cases be due to microlensing. Credit: PanSTARRS

    A photo of the PanSTARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System) telescope in Hawaii. Astronomers have used a sky survey from this facility to identify a class of blue, hypervariable galaxies; the origin of the variability is uncertain but might in some cases be due to microlensing. Credit: PanSTARRS

    Extreme variability in the intensity of the optical light of galaxies, by factors of 2 or more, is of great interest to astronomers. It can flag the presence of rare types of supernovae, for example, or spot sudden accretion activity around quiescent black holes or around the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s nucleus. In recent years systematic searches for such variability have been made using instruments that can survey wide swaths of the sky...

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