Microlensing tagged posts

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...

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—...

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...