Research Note

Probing the effect of gravitational microlensing on the measurements of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect

¹ Centro de Astrofísica, Universidade do Porto, Rua das Estrelas, 4150-762 Porto, Portugal
e-mail: moshagh@astro.up.pt
² Departamento de Física e Astronomia, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal
³ Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago, 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
⁴ Institute for Astronomy and NASA Astrobiology Institute, University of Hawaii-Manoa, 2680 Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA
⁵ Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Department of Computational Physics, University of Tuebingen, 72076 Tuebingen, Germany

Received: 22 July 2013
Accepted: 26 August 2013

Abstract

In general, in the studies of transit light-curves and the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect, the contribution of the planet’s gravitational microlensing is neglected. Theoretical studies, have, however shown that the planet’s microlensing can affect the transit light-curve and in some extreme cases cause the transit depth to vanish. In this paper, we present the results of our quantitative analysis of the contribution of microlensing on the RM effect. Results indicate that for massive planets in long-period orbits, the planet’s microlensing will have considerable contributions to the star’s RV measurements. We present the details of our study, and discuss our analysis and results.