The Implications of the Distribution of Exoplanets across the sky and along the Ecliptic

Astrology in the Era of Exoplanets

Authors:

Lund et al

Abstract:

The last two decades have seen the number of known exoplanets increase from a small handful to nearly 2000 known exoplanets, thousands more planet candidates, and several upcoming missions that are expected to further increase the population of known exoplanets. Beyond the strictly scientific questions that this has led to regarding planet formation and frequency, this has also led to broader questions such as the philosophical implications of life elsewhere in the universe and the future of human civilization and space exploration. One additional realm that hasn't been adequately considered, however, is that this large increase in exoplanets would also impact claims regarding astrology. In this paper we look at the distribution of planets across the sky and along the Ecliptic, as well as the current and future implications of this planet distribution.

This is an awful title.

Using Micro Lensing to Generate a Galactic Distribution of Exoplanets

Planet Sensitivity from Combined Ground- and Space-based Microlensing Observations

Authors:

Zhu et al

Abstract:

To move one step forward toward a Galactic distribution of planets, we present the first planet sensitivity analysis for microlensing events with simultaneous observations from space and the ground. We present this analysis for two such events, OGLE-2014-BLG-0939 and OGLE-2014-BLG-0124, which both show substantial planet sensitivity even though neither of them reached high magnification. This suggests that an ensemble of low to moderate magnification events can also yield significant planet sensitivity and therefore probability to detect planets. The implications of our results to the ongoing and future space-based microlensing experiments to measure the Galactic distribution of planets are discussed.