Activities

Objectives

Objectives

PLANET is an international collaboration (around 30 researchers from 10 countries) led by JP Beaulieu at the Institut d'Astrophysiqie de Paris since 2002.

PLANET has two overarching objectives: to detect and constrain exoplanets that only microlenses can detect to date (icy and/or floating planets, exolunes around cold planets), and to prepare for the major EUCLID and/or WFIRST space program surveys (ground-based exploratory program, development of photometry pipelines, improvement of microlens modeling software).

This project is supported by the IAP and was funded by the ANR under the HOLMES label (2007-2011). In the previous phase, we coordinated and used a worldwide network of microlens tracking telescopes (available on alert). Data was reduced with our pipelines and made available through our web interfaces to the rest of the community, with real-time modeling updates. We are now making the transition to a network of telescopes with wide-field cameras, ensuring simultaneous detection and tracking of a large number of microlenses. 2012 is a test year, with the team working in close collaboration with the SkyMapper telescope in Australia, and in coordination with the OGLE (Chile), MOA (New Zealand) and WISE (Israel) telescopes.