Probing Exoplanet Populations with Kepler and Microlensing
Abstract
The NASA Kepler mission revolutionized exoplanet studies by discovering that planetary systems are common and that close-in small planets are surprisingly abundant. Although Kepler did detect two dozen planet candidates with periods longer than 300 days and radii smaller than 2 Earth radii, the transit method is inherently more sensitive to planets orbiting close to their parent stars because the geometric likelihood and frequency of transits declines with increasing orbital period. In contrast, microlensing surveys are most sensitive to colder planets orbiting near the Einstein ring radius at distances of a few AU. Combining transit and microlensing data is therefore a powerful way to probe the overall architectures of planetary systems. I will discuss the advantages and challenges of combining information from multiple planet detection methods and review our current knowledge of exoplanet demographics.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #233
- Pub Date:
- January 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AAS...23322703D