Giant planets do not come as lonely hearts

Due to the lack of respective signatures, additional gas-giant planets more massive than Saturn can only reside in orbits smaller than that of Venus or substantially wider than that of OGLE-2006-BLG-109Lc. This leaves the plausible possibility for terrestrial planets (like Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) to reside inside the orbit of OGLE-2006-109Lb, which is likely to be the innermost giant planet. Moreover, planets taking the roles of Uranus and Neptune, respectively, could also be present. These features make the OGLE-2006-BLG-109L system the most similar to the Solar System amongst the about 25 exo-planetary systems discovered so far.

Given that we already know from observations that not all stars host gas-giant planets, and that the detection of each of them is not guaranteed, the double catch around OGLE-2006-BLG-109L suggests that they come as hierarchic systems rather than as lonesome objects. Dr Nicholas Rattenbury, STFC-funded Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Jodrell Bank Centre of Astrophysics, points out: "Like humans, gas-giant planets appear to prefer not to come as lonely hearts."

The contributing observations with the Liverpool Telescope (LT) were carried out as part of the RoboNet microlensing programme, whose principal investigator, Prof Keith Horne from the University of St Andrews remarks "The flexible scheduling and short response time of robotic telescopes is ideally suited to carry out a time-critical programme like the search for extra solar planets by microlensing." Apart from the Liverpool telescope, RoboNet exploits two further identical robotic telescopes with a diameter of 2m, the largest of their kind.

The RoboNet microlensing programme is spread over the network by means of intelligent-agent technology built by the eSTAR (e-Science Telescopes for Astronomical Research) Project. Dr Alasdair Allan from the University of Exeter, one of the core developers of eSTAR, explains "Single isolated telescopes are rapidly being integrated into expanding smart telescope networks, spanning continents and responding to transient events in seconds. These time-critical observations can be optimally scheduled across the network using Intelligent Agent technology which negotiates a contract for the observations with the remote telescopes".

The UK microlensing planet hunters are now preparing to boost their capabilities by adopting a fully-automated three-step approach of survey, follow-up, and anomaly monitoring. Enabled by the ARTEMiS (Automated Robotic Terrestrial Exoplanet Microlensing Search) expert system that determines the optimal target to be followed at any given time for any observing site, ground-based observations with a global network of telescopes could not only lead to the first detection of an Earth-mass extra-solar planet, but even of less massive ones.