Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment

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The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment is a Polish astronomy project based at Warsaw University that is chiefly concerned with discovering dark matter using the microlensing technique. Since the project began in 1992, it has discovered several extrasolar planets as a side benefit. The project is led by professor Andrzej Udalski from Warsaw University, who is a co-author of the discovery of OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb.

The main targets of the experiment are the Magellanic Clouds and the Galactic Bulge, because of the large number of intervening stars that can be used for microlensing during a stellar transit. Most of the observations have been taken at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Cooperating institutions include Princeton University and the Carnegie Institution.

The project has been divided into three phases, OGLE-I, OGLE-II, and the present OGLE-III. OGLE-I was the project pilot phase; for OGLE-II, a telescope was specially constructed in Poland and shipped to Chile. OGLE-III was primarily devoted to detecting transiting planets; the two fields observed during this phase were in the direction of the Galactic Bulge and the constellation Carina.

[edit] Planets discovered

Nine planets have so far been discovered by the OGLE project. Five of the planets were discovered by the transit method and four by the gravitational microlensing method.

Note. For events detected by the gravitational microlensing method, year stands for OGLE season, BLG means that an event detected is in the Galactic BuLGe, and the following 3-digit number is an ordinal number of microlensing event in that season. For events detected by the transit method TR stands for TRansit and the following 3-digit number is an ordinal number of transit event.