A Fast Approximate Approach to Microlensing Survey Analysis

Abstract

Microlensing can be used to discover exoplanets of a wide range of masses with orbits beyond ~ 1 AU, and even free-floating planets. The WFIRST mission will use microlensing to discover approximately 1600 planets by monitoring ~100 million stars to find ~50000 microlensing events. Modelling each microlensing event, especially the ones involving two or more lenses, is typically complicated and time-consuming, and analyzing thousands of WFIRST microlensing events is possibly infeasible using current methods. Here, we present an algorithm that is able to rapidly evaluate thousands of simulated WFIRST binary-lens microlensing light curves, returning an estimate for the physical parameters of the lens systems. We find that this algorithm can recover projected separations between the planet and the star very well for low-mass-ratio events, and can also estimate mass ratios within an order of magnitude for events with wide and close caustic topologies.

18 pages, 14 figures, Submitted to AAS journals

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Predictions of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Galactic Exoplanet Survey II: Free-Floating Planet Detection Rates
• Real-Time Likelihood-Free Inference of Roman Binary Microlensing Events with Amortized Neural Posterior Estimation
• OGLE-2013-BLG-0911Lb: A Secondary on the Brown-Dwarf Planet Boundary around an M-dwarf
• Classifying High-cadence Microlensing Light Curves I; Defining Features
• MAGIC: Microlensing Analysis Guided by Intelligent Computation