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Keyword: mesolensing

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  • Gravitational Mesolensing And The Hunt For Exoplanets

    03/18/2012 7:02:22 AM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 3 replies
    Scientific American 'blogs ^ | March 7, 2012 | Caleb A. Scharf | Life, Unbounded
    When astronomers talk about methods for finding exoplanets the list is relatively short. There is the radial velocity, or 'wobble' technique, which senses the motion of a star around a common center-of-mass with its planets. There is the transit technique, employed with great success by NASA's Kepler mission, and there are direct imaging and phase-photometry techniques -- challenging observations that seek the light being actually emitted or reflected from a planet. And then there is gravitational microlensing, the chance magnification of the light from a distant star by the distortion in spacetime due to the mass of a foreground star...