Constrain the prevalence of disk-bearing free-floating objects

Determine the prevalence of disk-bearing free-floating planetary-mass objects, brown dwarfs, and putative primordial black holes.

Background

The paper emphasizes that disk and ring dissipation is governed by a complex interplay of dynamical processes and that observations provide limited constraints on the relevant structures. Disk-bearing free-floating objects could therefore be missed or misclassified by automated microlensing pipelines if their lightcurves depart substantially from standard Paczyński curves.

The prevalence of such populations is important for planet-formation, stellar-formation, and cosmological theories. The authors propose that microlensing may be among the few techniques capable of constraining their abundance after the disks have cooled.