MICROLENSING, ANR 2007-2010

Principal Investigator : Jean-Philippe Beaulieu

Scientific director : Pascal Fouqué

Partners : Virginie Batista, Dave Bennett, Stéphane Brillant, Arnaud Cassan,  Christian Coutures, Stefann Dieters, Jadzia Donatowicz, John Greenhill, David Heyrovsky, Francisco Jablonski, Daniel Kubas, Jean-Baptiste Marquette, Ulysse Marboeuf, Eder Martioli, John Menzies, Olivier Mousis.

HOLMES is closely linked to PLANET and RoboNET networks of telescopes.

We intend to use our combined astronomical knowledge, our observational-, data reduction-, and modeling expertise as well as access to devoted telescope time at diverse geographical locations to perform rapid monitoring of on-going microlensing events in order to search for extrasolar planets via anomalies in the achromatic, point-source microlensing  curve. We stress that our primary scientific objective is to detect low mass extrasolar planets orbiting main sequence and dwarf stars in our Galaxy and to estimate their frequency of occurrence. Since the strength of our collaboration lies in the  combined resources of the group, we want to stress teamwork where we have common scientific goals while at the same time allowing members the freedom to pursue their individual scientific research in a way that protects the interests of all.

This cooperative agreement endorsed by the partners of HOLMES is meant to reflect this philosophical basis for our collaboration.

HOLMES is divided in several subgroups, responsible for the main tasks related to microlensing planet hunt.

Holmes division : data acquisition, online analysis, reduction (Coutures, Greenhill, Jablonski, Martioli, Menzies)

Bakerstreet : Website, online tools, archive, database (Donatowicz, Marquette)

Moriarty division : Modeling of microlensing event light curves (Batista, Bennett, Cassan, Heyrovsky, Kubas)

Baskerville division : Learning about properties of planet discovered by microlensing (Mousis).

The Four : Publication office

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