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    Microlensing tagged posts

    TESS just found a planet in a new way—and more may be hiding in its eight years of data

    July 3, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    microlensing
    This animation illustrates the concept of gravitational microlensing. When one star in the sky appears to pass nearly in front of another, the light rays of the background source star become bent due to the warped space-time around the foreground star. This star acts like a virtual magnifying glass, amplifying the brightness of the background source star. If the nearer star harbors a planetary system, then those planets can also act as lenses, each one producing a short deviation in the brightness of the source. When astronomers find planets this way, they can measure their mass and orbital distance from their host star. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab

    For the first time, NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission has identified a planet orbiting a ...

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    Peering into the Milky Way’s far side, Roman could unveil 100,000 worlds

    May 29, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Galactic Neighborhoods infographic
    This infographic features artist’s concept views of our Milky Way galaxy: face-on at the left and edge-on at the right. It highlights different galactic environments that could influence the development of planets and potentially life. The center of the galaxy is rich in the elements that form planets (like silicon, oxygen, and magnesium), which are forged by multiple generations of stars and supernova explosions. Planets there may be more common or larger, but they would also be flooded with radiation from densely packed stars (including massive ones that emit enormous amounts of high-energy ultraviolet light and X-rays). In the outskirts of the galaxy, where stars are much more spread out, radiation is far milder but there are also smaller amounts of planet-building materials...
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    Astronomers measure both mass and distance of a rogue planet for the first time

    January 5, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    rogue planet in space
    Image generated by the editorial team using DALL·E for illustrative purposes.

    The only way astronomers have been able to detect rogue planets is through microlensing events caused by the slight gravitational effect of an object on background light. This occurs when the light from a distant star suddenly appears magnified to an observer (telescopes on Earth), as if a lens were placed in front of it. The magnification of light lets astronomers know that something has passed in front of the distant star.

    Theoretically, microlensing can allow for the calculation of the mass of the object passing in front of the star by analyzing how much the light was bent and thus magnified...

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    AI reveals unsuspected Math underlying Search for Exoplanets

    May 25, 2022, Categories  Physics, Astronomy/Space

    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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