Inferring statistics of planet populations by means of automated microlensing searches

Understand

(abridged) The study of other worlds is key to understanding our own, and not only provides clues to the origin of our civilization, but also looks into its future.

• Rather than in identifying nearby systems and learning about their individual properties, the main value of the technique of gravitational microlensing is in obtaining the statistics of planetary populations within the Milky Way and beyond.
• Only the complementarity of different techniques currently employed promises to yield a complete picture of planet formation that has sufficient predictive power to let us understand how habitable worlds like ours evolve, and how abundant such systems are in the Universe.
• A cooperative three-step strategy of survey, follow-up, and anomaly monitoring of microlensing targets, realized by means of an automated expert system and a network of ground-based telescopes is ready right now to be used to obtain a first census of cool planets with masses reaching even below that of Earth orbiting K and M dwarfs in two distinct stellar populations, namely the Galactic bulge and disk.