Cool Earths: Discovering Exoplanets beyond the Snow-line with Gravitational Microlensing

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This proposal presents a 3-year gravitational microlensing project to discover new exoplanets in the cold outer regions of planetary systems, including free-floating planets and, potentially, planets around stellar remnants. For enhanced sensitivity to planets of smaller masses (small than or equal to 10 Earth masses), we propose an integrated approach that combines survey and high-cadence follow-up observations on a homogeneous network of robotic telescopes.Even though planet formation theories predict that planets with semi-major axes of a few or many AU should be abundant, they lie beyond the detection limits of most planet finding techniques. To this day, this important region of planetary parameter space remains largely unexplored. Discovering them (or possibly finding that there are few there than expected) is critical for our understanding of the physical processes that drive planet formation.Combining the strengths of the microlensing technique - namely its unique sensitivity to this type of planet - with the amazing capabilities of the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) global network of robotic telescopes, we propose to not only detect planets down to Earth-masses beyond the snow-line from ground-based observations, but also to characterize them.