Mesolensing: Employing the Power of Lensing in the Solar Neighborhood

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Dr. Di Stefano and her co-investigators will use gravitational lensing to explore the local neighborhood of the Galaxy, the region within 1 kiloparsec. They will develop methods to identify local neutron stars, to measure their masses and transverse velocities, and to determine the fraction of them with companions, including planets. These studies will allow ongoing and new programs, including the planned Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, to discover and study hundreds of neutron stars. This work and parallel work may lead to the discovery of dozens of local black holes, as well as low-mass dwarf stars. Studies of planets around dwarf stars via gravitational lensing may have implications for our understanding of the ubiquity of life throughout the Universe.The Broader Impacts of this program include methods for automated detection and classification of variability, which has broad application, and training of graduate and undergraduate students.