Latest Gravitational microlensing Stories

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Researchers at The University of Auckland wrote in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that they have a new method that could lead to the discovery of 100 billion earth-like planets. The new strategy, called gravitational microlensing, requires a combination of data from microlensing and the NASA Kepler space telescope. “Kepler finds Earth-sized planets that are quite close to parent stars, and it estimates that...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers using simulations were able to catch the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) in the act of stealing stars away from its neighbor, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The team was trying to look for massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) in order to find out if they could be a major component of dark matter. In order for MACHOs to make up dark matter, they must be so faint that they can't be directly detected. When studying the...

[ Watch the Video ] Planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception An international team, including three astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), has used the technique of gravitational microlensing to measure how common planets are in the Milky Way. After a six-year search that surveyed millions of stars, the team concludes that planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception. The results will appear in the journal Nature on 12 January 2012....

Even the most powerful high-tech telescopes are barely able to record remote low-mass and thus faint stars. Together with researchers from Poland and Chile, an astrophysicist from the University of Zurich has now detected a low-mass star in globular cluster M22 for the first time through microlensing. The result indicates that the overall mass of globular clusters might well be explained without enigmatic dark matter. Until now, it was merely assumed that low-mass and therefore extremely...

[ Watch the Video ] A team of scientists has used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe a quasar accretion disc — a brightly glowing disc of matter that is slowly being sucked into its galaxy’s central black hole. Their study makes use of a novel technique that uses gravitational lensing to give an immense boost to the power of the telescope. The incredible precision of the method has allowed astronomers to directly measure the disc’s size and plot the temperature across...

WASHINGTON, May 18, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Astronomers, including a NASA-funded team member, have discovered a new class of Jupiter-sized planets floating alone in the dark of space, away from the light of a star. The team believes these lone worlds probably were ejected from developing planetary systems. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The discovery is based on a joint Japan-New Zealand survey that scanned the center of the Milky Way galaxy during...

In their quest to find solar systems analogous to ours, astronomers have determined how common our solar system is.They've concluded that about 15 percent of stars in the galaxy host systems of planets like our own, with several gas giant planets in the outer part of the solar system."Now we know our place in the universe," said Ohio State University astronomer Scott Gaudi. "Solar systems like our own are not rare, but we're not in the majority, either."Gaudi reported the results of the new...

Astronomers have reason to believe that they have witnessed signs of the first planet to be spotted outside of our galaxy.The planet is located in the Andromeda galaxy and is estimated to have a mass six times that of Jupiter. The method of viewing this newly discovered planet is through gravitational lensing, where the light from a very distant, bright source is "bent" around a massive object between the source object and the observer. The team that utilized a type of gravitational...

Combining a double natural "magnifying glass" with the power of ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have scrutinized the inner parts of the disc around a supermassive black hole 10 billion light-years away. They were able to study the disc with a level of detail a thousand times better than that of the best telescopes in the world, providing the first observational confirmation of the prevalent theoretical models of such discs. The team of astronomers from Europe and the...

Newly discovered extrasolar planet is the smallest known and has smallest host starAn international team of astronomers led by David Bennett of the University of Notre Dame has discovered an extra-solar planet of about three Earth masses orbiting a star with a mass so low that its core may not be large enough to maintain nuclear reactions. The result was presented Monday (June 2) at the American Astronomical Society annual meeting in St. Louis.The planet, referred to as MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb,...