Seems like they picked up a lot more 'events', too …
Quote:
Although there are a thousand microlensing events in this sample, only 474 well characterized events have passed our strict selection criteria. Ten of these events have tE < 2 days {ie: "Lensing Transit duration"}... thus indicating planetary-mass lenses.
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.. they seem to have covered the 'false positive' aspects fairly well …
Quote:
we have confirmed that this event sample has no significant contamination by possible background effects including: (1) cosmic-ray hits, (2) fast-moving objects, (3) cataclysmic variables (4) background supernovae, (5) binary microlensing events, and (6) microlensing by high-velocity stars and Galactic halo stellar remnants. For example, effect (1) is excluded because cosmic-rays never hit the same place in four consecutive images, microlensing model fits for effects (2) to (5) produce a high χ2 and unphysical values of parameters, and effect (6) is excluded by proper- motion and radial-velocity observations…
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Seems they are saying both ejection and protoplanetary disk formation, are still contenders, and cannot be ruled out by these observations …
Quote:
Planet-formation theories predict that dynamical instabilities in planetary systems with multiple giant planets could scatter many of these planets into unbound orbits, as well as some into large separations. Recent observations also indicate that planet-planet scattering plays an important part in moving giant planets into short-period orbits. The planetary-mass population that we have identified here may have formed in protoplanetary disks at much smaller separations and then been scattered into unbound or very distant orbits.
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Makes you wonder how much of a role the complexity of the n-body problem plays in the establishment, (or otherwise), of stable 'solar' systems.
Cheers