Hunting for Frozen Super-Earths via Microlensing

Abstract

In order to obtain a census of planets with masses in the range of Earth to Jupiter, eight telescopes are being used by the combined microlensing campaign of the PLANET and RoboNet collaborations for high-cadence photometric round-the-clock follow-up of ongoing events, alerted by the OGLE and MOA surveys. In 2005 we detected a planet of 5.5 Earth masses at 2.6 AU from its parent 0.22 MA M star. This object is the first member of a new class of cold telluric planets. Its detection confirms the power of this method and, given our detection efficiency, suggests that these recently-detected planets may be quite common around M stars, as confirmed by subsequent detection of a ~ 13 Earth-mass planet. Using a network of dedicated 1 2-m-class telescopes, we have entered a new phase of planet discovery, and will be able to provide constraints on the abundance of frozen Super-Earths in the near future